Science & Technology
Science and Technology
Science and Technology
Tue, October 13, 2009 Riverbed Technology: Insurance Firm Deploys Riverbed to Improve Disaster Recovery and Achieve LAN-Like Speeds for Branch Office
SAN FRANCISCO--(Marketwire - October 13, 2009) - [ Riverbed Technology ] (
ABDI provides insurance brokerage, risk management, and employee benefits consulting solutions and services in the United States. Formed in 1990, the company grew to the 14th largest insurance brokerage in the nation prior to its acquisition by Wells Fargo in 2007. As a financial services company, it is critical for ABDI to keep customer data centralized and secure, while also ensuring that the data is quickly accessible by employees in remote offices. However, the distance between its centralized data and branch offices led employees to experience slow response times when accessing customer data and communicating with team members in dispersed offices via email. In addition, the large amount of data that was distributed to and from dispersed offices in a day could not be backed up within 24 hours. This presented a major obstacle for ABDI's disaster recovery (DR) efforts, as data replication times were exceeding seven days.
"We needed a solution that would not only improve our disaster recovery efforts but also improve our productivity," said Jerome Keller, data center manager at ABDI. "Our regional offices were requesting major network upgrades, which included doubling the number of T1 lines and adding a new DS3. However, we knew that adding more bandwidth wouldn't take care of latency issues."
The company decided to look into WAN optimization. After an independent lab evaluation of WAN optimization alternatives from Cisco, Blue Coat and Riverbed, the company selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances due to their simplicity of deployment, ease-of-management and performance. As a result of its Steelhead appliance deployment, ABDI accelerated and streamlined its backup and replication processes, reducing its backup times by 85 percent and achieving a 70 percent reduction in bandwidth utilization. ABDI exceeded the company's stringent end-to-end throughput requirements with Steelhead appliances, achieving Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of four hours and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of two hours that was required to protect the company's assets and improve its business continuity processes.
"Selecting WAN optimization was an easy choice, but Riverbed really made the difference," said Keller. "By reducing our backup time to 24 hours, Riverbed helped ensure our data was secure. Previously, when data took up to a week to back up, all of our client information was at risk. In the event of a disaster, our company would have had to resort to backup tapes and NetApp replication."
The Steelhead deployment has also enabled ABDI branch office employees to quickly access data and critical business applications, such as email, Microsoft SQL, SAP BusinessObjects and Vertafore-Sagitta.
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, statements regarding performance results of Riverbed solutions and customer payback following implementation of Riverbed solutions that may suggest likely or certain outcomes, and statements relating to Riverbed's ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed's business are set forth in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on July 30, 2009. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT infrastructure performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility -- all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more responsive. Additional information about Riverbed (
Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, Think Fast, the Riverbed logo, Mazu, Profiler and Cascade are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
