CASE STUDY

Golder Associates Golder Associates Implements Riverbed Products - Accelerates SharePointFounded in 1960, Golder Associates has become one of the most respected engineering and envi-ronmental services groups in the world. The company employs approximately 7,800 people who work in 160 offices located throughout across six continents. Golder’s services include air quality, environmental engineering, geophysics, cultural sciences, geosciences, and risk analysis.

Key to the company’s success is its ability to put the right talent on a project regardless of where the person or the project is located. To make this approach work, Golder’s 160 offices are linked by a private intranet called GoldNet. Smaller offices (two or three employees) are connected to the intranet with T1 lines whereas larger offices (400 people or more) have T3 broadband Internet con-nections that are up to 30 times faster. The company uses Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to coordinate project activities and share project data (e.g., office documents, CAD models, and GIS maps). SharePoint is centralized in the company’s Seattle-area data center.

Challenge: SharePoint pages were slow to download in some regions Golder’s IT team was aware that centralizing SharePoint would generate a great deal of traffic across the company’s network. Even before deploying SharePoint they had seen how challenging it could be to digitally transmit large project files between offices. To ensure that GoldNet could handle the coming changes, the IT team took two actions. First, they installed Steelhead wide area network (WAN) optimization appliances from Riverbed Technology at every one of the company’s physical offices. Second, they resolved to reduce SharePoint page load times to seven seconds or less.

“Performance gains from the Steelhead appliances were really impressive,” said Greg Stimson, financial and program manager at Golder. “Large files requested from our SharePoint intranet went from 10 minutes or more down to just a few seconds on a warm transfer. While emails aren’t quite as large as many of those files, we also saw the relative improvement. Additionally, we saw really big gains with Veritas NetBackup. We were typically backing up a lot of gigs per day, and that was reduced to just megabytes.”

The Steelhead appliances performed as the company had hoped in terms of accelerating information across the network. However, there was another issue with SharePoint that the appliances could not address despite their powerful application streaming, transport streamlining, and data deduplication tech-niques. It took way too long for SharePoint pages to load completely into an end user’s browser.

Golder employees working in offices far from the Washington-based data center were having trouble downloading SharePoint pages with a lot of content. “Users in Johannesburg, South Africa, had to wait almost a minute for a certain SharePoint page to load,” said Andrew Osterbeck, an enterprise infrastructure architect at Golder. “We had similar situations in Asia and Australia – anywhere that users had high-latency, low-bandwidth connections.” The slow page loads were discouraging the use of SharePoint.

IN BRIEF Riverbed® Stingray® Aptimizer™ delivers SharePoint pages quickly to regions with high latency and low bandwidth

Industry

»» Environmental Consulting

Challenges

»» Slow SharePoint page load times in high-latency, low-bandwidth regions

»» Limited enterprise collaboration due to sub-par SharePoint performance; goal of having SharePoint pages load in 7 sec-onds or less, regardless of user’s location

Solution

»» 160+ Riverbed® Steelhead® appliances for WAN acceleration

»» Riverbed Stingray Aptimizer for web content optimization (WCO)

Benefits

»» SharePoint page load times in South Africa improved by 3x

»» Increased use of company’s intranet

»» Cost of a content mirroring service avoided

»» Fewer restraints on website developers

»» Stage set for mobile device support

“Although the primary benefit of Stingray Aptimizer software is

performance improvement, it has also helped improve adoption of

the intranet in those areas where performance originally lagged.”

Determined, the IT team set a goal of having SharePoint pages load in seven seconds or less, and ideally in three to four seconds, for all users, regardless of location. While Golder’s web developers were able to make slight improvements with page loading time, the trend toward larger, code-heavy web pages led the team to look for other solutions as well.

Solution: Stingray Aptimizer software for web content optimizationIn its research, Golder’s IT staff found a couple of ways to address the problem. One was to contract with a content mirroring service, which they soon realized was a fairly expensive solution. Another option was to invest in a more affordable web content optimization (WCO) solution – Stingray Aptimizer software from Riverbed®.

A WCO solution is set up on the Web server for dramatic acceleration of web-based content and websites. It speeds page loads in a number of ways, such as by reducing the number of round trips made between the user’s browser and the server, and by dynamically optimizing HTML, JavaScript and image output from the server.

Golder’s positive experience with Steelhead appliances, and the fact that the two solutions could work together (Steelhead appliances for SharePoint file transfers and Stingray Aptimizer products for SharePoint page loads), convinced the company to give it a try. The software installation was “easy and done in about half a day,” according to Osterbeck. Golder did not have to install any additional hardware, nor was it necessary to change the code on the SharePoint server.

Benefits: Faster page loads encourage use of intranet – sets the stage for more ubiquitous access Once deployed, Stingray Aptimizer immediately began reducing SharePoint page load times in regions where performance had previously been poor. The page that took 55 seconds to become available to a user in Johannesburg, for instance, took only 15 seconds for the first view after Stingray Aptimizer software was installed. Subsequent views took several seconds at most. Other pages downloaded in Johannesburg in as little as two to four seconds. A SharePoint page that took five seconds to load on a user’s computer in Europe took only 1.2 seconds after its deployment – a 4x improvement.

With the SharePoint pages loading more quickly, the IT team is very close to meeting its goal of having the pages download in seven seconds or less for all users. More importantly, faster access to SharePoint information is encouraging the use of SharePoint and GoldNet, which is critical to company-wide col-laboration. “Although the primary benefit of Aptimizer is performance improvement, another is that it has improved the adoption of the intranet in those areas where performance originally lagged,” says Stimson.

Golder’s Web developers also benefit from the Stingray Aptimizer software deployment. “There’s a tendency for people to want to put a lot of content in these SharePoint pages,” explains Stimson. “The developers must balance that with having pages meet our target of downloading in less than seven seconds. This software gives them more flexibility than they might otherwise have.”

The Aptimizer software deployment is sparing Golder the cost of a content mirroring service. In addi-tion, it is laying the foundation for another IT initiative: SharePoint access from mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet computers. “We’re moving to make access more ubiquitous, so that users can access SharePoint from any place at any time,” says Stimson. With SharePoint 2010’s support for mobile devices, and Aptimizer 2.5, which also supports mobile devices, Golder can continue using global collaboration as a competitive advantage.

CASE STUDY: Golder Associates

CASE STUDY: Golder Associates

SUMMARY

The ability to put the right talent on a project – regardless of where the person or the project is located – has long been a key component of Gold-er’s success. The company supports collaboration among its 7,800 globally dispersed employees by means of an intranet and a centralized deployment of Microsoft SharePoint.

In regions where bandwidth is low and latency is high, Golder’s SharePoint web pages were taking so long to load that employees were discouraged from using the SharePoint portal. At the time, Golder was already a satis-fied Riverbed customer, having installed Steelhead appliances at every one of its 160 physical offices. But the WAN optimization techniques performed by the Steelhead appliances were not designed to accelerate the loading of SharePoint web page content by users’ browsers.

For this, Golder turned to another Riverbed product, Stingray Aptimizer software. Following a half-day installation on the SharePoint server, Sting-ray Aptimizer software immediately began to speed SharePoint page loads in South Africa, Asia, Australia, and other regions that previously experi-enced poor performance. A SharePoint page that originally took 55 seconds to load for a user in Johannesburg took only 15 seconds after the software was deployed. Stingray Aptimizer software has spared Golder the cost of a more expensive solution, such as content mirroring, while encouraging the use of SharePoint and reducing the constraints faced by the company’s website developers.

About RiverbedRiverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.

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