Riverbed Technology today said Lathrop & Gage, a law firm in the United States, is utilizing Riverbed Application Performance Platform solutions and increased network capacity by 200 percent to 300 percent.
By using Riverbed SteelHead features of path selection, WAN optimization and QoS functionality, combined with Riverbed SteelCentral network performance management (NPM) solutions, the firm has reduced 90-second failovers to five seconds or less and reduced IT troubleshooting to minutes.
Lathrop & Gage, headquartered in Kansas City, has two separate 10-gigabyte MPLS networks link headquarters and regional offices to each other and to the firm’s two data centers. Each data center has its own Internet connection as well. All of the firm’s critical applications – Microsoft Office, Exchange, Outlook, legal document management system (Autonomy iManage), VoIP and video conferencing (Cisco Unified Communications Manager) – are centralized in data centers and delivered over the MPLS network.
Until recently, one MPLS network was active while the other was passive, used only when a failover from the active network occurred. This configuration was not cost effective and caused problems for the attorneys.
“Ninety seconds doesn’t sound like a lot, but it isn’t really 90 seconds. Your phone has to reset so you drop the call you’re on. If someone tries to call you back they’re not going to be able to reach you. If you’re using Outlook, your session disconnects. Ninety seconds can cause a fatal application error. Ninety seconds is a very disruptive disconnect,” said Tim Soto, IT infrastructure manager at Lathrop & Gage.
Lathrop & Gage relies on a range of Riverbed solutions to ensure the availability of the attorney’s phones, conferencing system and software applications.
Its SteelHead appliances provide WAN optimization that ensures LAN-like performance of applications over the network; quality of service (QoS) functionality, which allows the IT team to prioritize voice traffic over recreational traffic; and path selection, for directing business-critical traffic over an MPLS network and recreational traffic over the Internet – turning the active-passive network configuration into an active-active one.
Lathrop & Gage’s SteelCentral NPM solutions include SteelCentral Flow Gateway, which collects, aggregates, and compresses flow data, SteelCentral NetShark for high-performance packet capture, and a SteelCentral NetProfiler appliance, which combines flow, packet capture and SteelHead performance data to enable proactive network monitoring, analysis, and reporting. This solution allows the IT team to troubleshoot network issues in minutes.
With both MPLS circuits now active, usable bandwidth increased by 200 percent to 300 percent before WAN optimization and without any additional capital expense. Path selection also decreases failover speeds, which are down to a non-disruptive five seconds or less.
MPLS has proven to be light years ahead of Frame Relay,
but I wonder if WAN Virtualization (http://vocalipnetworx.co/wan-ad/n)
will replace MPLS?