Case Study: WAN Optimization Enables Global Design Firm to Share CAD/Visualization Files and Collaborate Live Over

Internet

This document details an example of a global design service provider using wide-area network (WAN) optimization to enable live multisite collaboration and remote access to its large graphic files and documentation through a direct connection to the Internet. This approach not only enabled the company Woods Bagot to avoid significant bandwidth upgrade costs, but also increased overall usage of the network, thereby improving the IT team s reputation with both employees and management. WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW WAN optimization technology can be a good choice for organizations facing challenges with application performance. As design firm Woods Bagot found, significant application performance challenges can be overcome without spending any more on WAN links. The savings are usually so great that payback for the upfront cost of deploying WOCs can be had in as little as a few months. As a result, this technology helps IT staff win the confidence of both users and management. Introduction Woods Bagot, a global architecture design practice, has over 1,000 employees across five regions and three customer segments: Education and Science, Lifestyle and Workplace. Among the well-known projects to its name are ones for The University of Hong Kong, Qatar Science & Technology Park, and Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Woods Bagot aims to be a global leader in design and consulting, differentiating itself from others by utilizing a global talent pool that collaborates seamlessly across different locations. It is important for it to have the right people working on the right project. This helps its workers do a good job. It also helps the company attract and retain the cream of the crop. Woods Bagot s IT team, which had been entrusted to support the organization s business objectives, had undertaken a major revamp of the company s entire IT setup, including an ERP and CRM implementation and deployment of a Microsoft SharePoint-based intranet to improve knowledge sharing and employee collaboration.

The Challenge Woods Bagot s employees access and use their intranet and corporate applications through direct-to-net virtual private network (VPN) connectivity over Ethernet Internet access. The nature of the work done by Woods Bagot required the transfer of large CAD files and documentation across the VPN. These files would take several minutes to download, hampering the ability of Woods Bagot s globally dispersed team to work live on design projects time lags meant coordination problems in relation to when a team in one location had finished working on files and teams elsewhere could start working on those same files. The back-and-forth transfer of huge files over the Internet link also had an impact on other corporate applications, such as ERP, CRM and e-mail/Internet access: the graphicheavy traffic grabbed all the bandwidth it could, clogging the path for all other traffic. To make things even more challenging, a requirement was emerging to support time-sensitive traffic including voice telephony, videoconferencing and a newly deployed Windows Media streaming application across the WAN. One way to meet this need would have been to deploy significant extra bandwidth at considerable cost, but the IT team did not believe that adding bandwidth would solve all CCNA 4- Case Study Page 1

Woods Bagot s issues. Lack of visibility into the network would remain, hindering the company s ability to reserve enough bandwidth for crucial business applications and to limit the bandwidth consumed by less important traffic. As things stood, the company s problems with application performance were having a bad effect on employees and management. Employees productivity suffered as a result of long wait times between downloads indirectly lowering their morale, too. Even more importantly, the management had come to view IT as a barrier to the business s growth and potential to meet objectives.

Approach In 2007, Woods Bagot brought new thinking to its IT, with the backing of its IT leaders and the company s senior management. The IT team set out to challenge the status quo and approach the IT challenges with a fresh approach, which included embracing alternatives if they made business sense. To address the application performance issues, Woods Bagot needed a solution that could address the organization s specific requirements, based on the state of its current applications, the highly-meshed network access profile of its users, and cost constraints. After the initial months of assessment, the IT team had several options to consider. Increasing bandwidth at the sites was one obvious option. However, this would mean spending significant additional sums of money since the places where additional bandwidth was required studio sites in Dubai and Abu Dhabi are regulated markets with monopolistic tariff regimes. Upgrading from 6-Mbps links to 10-Mbps links would have cost more than an additional $40,000 per month for these two locations alone. Also, there was no guarantee that adding bandwidth would solve the application performance problems, and the IT team firmly believed that lack of bandwidth was only one of the factors impacting application performance. Another option that was considered was to deploy a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Internet Protocol (IP) VPN. But this was again too costly. With the budget available, only a 2-Mbps connection was possible for Woods Bagot, and even that would be over $35,000 per month more than the company s existing spending. Another key reason for not using MPLS was the need to upload and download large files to and from third-party websites. MPLS would not enable this to be done efficiently, since it did not provide direct Internet access from all branch offices. In this context, it made sense for the company to continue using direct-to- Internet connections to ensure quick online access to these third party resources. Another inhibitor to using MPLS was its lack of QoS capability for things like rate limiting, content delivery network (CDN)-boosted Web traffic, and bandwidth prioritization at the level of specific applications. Other options considered were Microsoft Windows Distributed File System (DFS) replications and application/database centralization. But DFS s lack of network usage efficiency and network layer visibility ruled it out of consideration in the context of direct Internet connectivity. In addition, the option of centralization was viable only for the intranet that is, for corporate applications and data. For the CAD and visualization files a centralized model was simply not viable: at hundreds of megabytes each, these files were just too large. Another obstacle was that Woods Bagot s CAD tools were not ready for a centralized database model over a WAN, as they lacked adequate version control features and network optimization for live multisite collaboration.

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The approach that finally met the IT team s expectations and needs was WAN optimization. With WOCs deployed at each site, the byte caching and redundancy elimination features of these appliances would enable a remote virtual team to work live on a segment of a CAD or visualization file residing on a server in another location. In addition, the QoS and acceleration enabled by these appliances would bring to the IT team greater visibility into, and control over, the overall traffic on the network this could potentially reduce bandwidth contention between applications and users, and significantly improve the employees satisfaction as application users. Furthermore, WAN optimization could save the company several thousands of dollars while meeting its other requirements. This made it much easier for the IT team to present to senior company managers a case justifying investment in this technology. The next step was to evaluate the best offering available. Woods Bagot approached this issue from three perspectives for the three shortlisted vendors: the vendor, its technology and its relationships with system integrators (SIs): Riverbed Technology. It was very difficult to talk to them, according to the Woods Bagot IT team, which also felt this vendor s offering was oversold, with too many SIs and no differentiation. From a product perspective, Wood Bagot considered Riverbed s caching very good but its QoS lacking. There was an additional charge for a softWOC client, and the overall price seemed expensive. Exinda. Woods Bagot thought this vendor had a good product and reasonably priced. But the vendor s financial viability was a major cause for concern. Blue Coat Systems. Acceleration of CIFS [Common Internet File System] and HTTPS traffic, along with greater visibility of network, and the ability to do the best QoS, was what convinced us about their solution, said Nectarios Lazaris, Woods Bagot s group IT operations manager. More importantly for Lazaris and his IT team, it was Blue Coat s availability and willingness to rise to the occasion with its own engineers and those of its SIs that really differentiated it from Riverbed and Exinda. It also helped that Blue Coat s prices were affordable. Results Woods Bagot chose Blue Coat as its WAN optimization vendor. Woods Bagot has completed a parallel deployment of Blue Coat ProxySG and PacketShaper appliances in each of its 16 global locations. The PacketShaper appliances monitor the applications crossing the WAN and the Internet gateways, applying compression and QoS to ensure network availability and maintain policy-based usage. They work in conjunction with the ProxySG appliances that apply WAN optimization technologies to mission-critical applications, such as file transfer using CIFS and the moving of large visualization files. Technical Results Before deploying WOCs, Woods Bagot s sharing of large CAD, visualization and documentation files through FTP was extremely slow, and through CIFS it was almost impossible. With CIFS protocol and FTP optimization, together with features like byte caching and redundancy elimination, live multisite collaboration became a reality and is now working well. With the implementation of QoS and application acceleration, the performance of corporate applications such as ERP, e-mail and the SharePoint intranet also improved significantly. Limitations on the centralized deployment of these were removed and applications CCNA 4- Case Study Page 3

response times improved dramatically. With QoS, traffic shaping and other features in place, support for delay-sensitive traffic like voice telephony, videoconferencing and media streaming was also delivered.

Operational and Business Results Wood Bagot s IT team: Gained greater visibility and control in its work, which enabled it to establish a very intelligent network. This aligned with, and enabled the achievement of, the business s goal of creating a virtual global studio, with the best talent used for every project, regardless of location. Saved significant costs a few tens of thousands of dollars optimization implementation also contributed to significant cost savings by enabling the organization to reduce travel costs through videoconferencing and media streaming. The savings were so significant that the appliances paid for themselves in just four months solely by avoiding the need for additionally costly WAN links. Improved user satisfaction and employee productivity by reducing huge time lags in the passing of work between sites and by serving applications faster. Won over the management to the extent that they want more such productive projects to be undertaken by the IT team in future. The present project has made life easier for IT staff and ensured longer-term commitment from the top. Woods Bagot considers the process of choosing and implementing WAN optimization to have been fast roughly four months from formulation of concept to evaluation of technology, selection of vendor, implementation and commissioning. It is happy with the vendor selected: What was promised was delivered, and the vendor and SI worked together as a team, rising to the challenge. Altogether, Woods Bagot is happy with what it has achieved by implementing Blue Coat s ProxySG and PacketShaper technologies.

Critical Success Factors Woods Bagot did not react to its application performance issues by doing the obvious adding bandwidth or centralizing the applications. It decided on an approach only after assessing its requirements clearly and evaluating thoroughly the different technology options available. If it had to, Woods Bagot would go through the same process again. In addition, it would pressure application vendors to collaborate and provide feedback to WAN optimization vendors in order to achieve better performance of applications. For its next round of WOC acquisition/expansion, Woods Bagot will favor WAN acceleration vendors that work most closely or actively with software vendors

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