Silver Atena

IN BRIEF

Industry

• Engineering

Challenges

• Implement a private cloud strategy without adversely affecting employee productivity

Solution

• Eight Riverbed Steelhead appliances
• Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC)
• Riverbed Services Platform (RSP)

Benefits

• Centralization of IT services to a private cloud infrastructure in Germany
• Elimination of back-up systems in the German branch offices
• Removal of print and file servers at branch office layer
• 4.5x reduction in bandwidth utilization
• Eight local servers removed, resulting in reduced management and licensing costs

Silver Atena

Riverbed Steelhead appliances and RSP enable engineering company to implement branch office box and private cloud initiatives

Silver Atena is a leading international organization that develops safety critical and high integrity systems for the aerospace, automotive, rail and other related safety critical markets. It has more than 500 staff based across the globe serving some of the world’s largest multinational companies. The IT department of Silver Atena is headquartered in Munich, Germany.

Challenge: Implement a private cloud strategy without adversely affecting employee productivity

The IT department of Silva Atena had decided to deploy a private cloud strategy, removing its local branch offices servers and consolidating IT services to a central location in Germany. By reducing the number of local servers, Silver Atena IT planned to take advantage of both the cost savings associated with reduced maintenance and license fees, as well as improve file back-up processes.

With the decentralized system, backups were performed by employees and proved to be both time-consuming and inefficient. “We had assigned employees at each branch office location to oversee the IT requirements, including backup of data. In the majority of cases these IT requirements could take up to three hours per week to complete,” says Rudolf Labermeier, Silver Atena’s IT infrastructure manager.

“And if the employee responsible for backing up data was absent for any reason, no backups were made,” It was a situation that had potentially damaging consequences if business-critical data was lost, and Silver Atena IT uses a number of mission-critical applications including, Microsoft Office and MATLAB, a high-level technical computing language.

A further concern was that the company relied upon Concurrent Versions System (CVS) to develop its in-house software. CVS is a software revision control system used by software developers to collaborate when managing source code and software development. Silver Atena IT had a central repository for the software, but developers at some of the branch offices were not always able to access the central repository due to bandwidth limitations. This made it difficult for the developers to determine if they were working on the latest revision.

Solution: Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) enables greater consolidation of branch office services

Silver Atena IT knew that moving files from a local area network (LAN) to a wide area network (WAN) would result in deterioration of application performance and that increasing bandwidth would not resolve the issue due to latency over the WAN associated with Windows file sharing applications. Instead the company investigated WAN optimization solutions.

Silver Atena IT initially tested the Riverbed Steelhead appliances and was particularly interested in the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), which enables up to five applications to be run virtually on VMware in the branch office. Deployment of the RSP would allow Silver Atena IT to implement a ‘branch office box’ solution and remove local DNS/DHCP, file, and print servers. “As no other vendor was able to offer this level of functionality, we quickly concluded our tests and chose to install Riverbed,” recalls Labermeier.

Benefits: 4.5x reduction in bandwidth utilization enables implementation of private cloud services and RSP enables a ‘branch office box’ solution

Silver Atena IT has deployed Steelhead appliances and RSP in all six offices and experienced a 4.5x reduction in bandwidth utilization, which has enabled the company to consolidate its mission critical applications to the data center, remove servers from the branch offices and reduce management and software licensing costs. In total eight servers have been removed. Labermeier is extremely enthusiastic about Riverbed. “We now have a private cloud infrastructure thanks to Riverbed, and the RSP solution has allowed us to consolidate our IT services even further and work towards a truly server-less branch office infrastructure.”

Back-up processes have also been transformed. “Data backups are now made from a central location, take less time than previously, and we no longer rely on local staff to be available. Employees can now work on more productive activities,” says Labermeier. Silver Atena IT is now able to maximize its resources by using a tiered storage system – an option that was difficult and costly to implement when using a local back-up system. Tiered storage enables different categories of data to be stored on different types of storage media. For example, files that are regularly accessed can be stored on high-speed devices, and then eventually migrated to tape if they are not used for a certain period of time.

In addition Silver Atena IT now has a central repository for its software revision control system, ensuring that developers are working on the latest version when updating source code. Silver Atena IT has also installed the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC) in the data center, enabling the team to deploy, configure, and manage the Steelhead appliances from a central location. “Riverbed has made our IT infrastructure more flexible, more effective and saved us time and money. We feel that our long-term investment in a WAN optimization solution has been protected by opting for Riverbed,” says Labermeier.

SUMMARY

Silver Atena IT wanted to implement a private cloud strategy but realized that moving files from a LAN to a WAN would result in poor application download speeds. Silver Atena IT chose Riverbed Steelhead appliances and the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), which has enabled the company to deliver a branch office box solution and remove the majority of its local servers including DNS/DHCP, file, and print servers.

With Riverbed solutions installed, Silver Atena IT has consolidated servers to a data center, enabling a private cloud initiative, and reduced its server management and application licensing costs. Other benefits include a 4.5x reduction in bandwidth utilization, increased employee productivity, a centralized backup system with reduced data backup window and greater file integrity.

 “As no other vendor offered a ‘branch office box’ solution, we chose to install Riverbed across the organization,”

“We now have a private cloud infrastructure thanks to Riverbed, and the RSP solution has allowed us to consolidate our IT services even further, and work towards a truly server-less branch office infrastructure.”

“Riverbed has made our IT infrastructure more flexible, more effective and saved us time and money.”