Al Abbar Group Deploys Riverbed Steelhead To Enhance IT Infrastructure

Riverbed Technology, the IT performance company, has announced that Al Abbar Group, a multi-national company, has deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at its offices in Dubai and India to increase the performance of its centralised IT infrastructure and improve employee productivity. With Riverbed, applications are now performing up to 30x faster over the wide area network (WAN), while bandwidth utilisation has been reduced by 2-3x and file transfer times cut down by over 3x. Al Abbar Group specialises in the engineering, manufacturing and installation of architectural building envelopes in the Middle East and Asia.

“With our applications centralised at our datacentre our employees began to complain of lengthy delays in accessing documents and files over the WAN. Users were becoming frustrated, and productivity began to suffer through lost time and money,” said Manoj Gopalakrishnan, ICT Manager, Al Abbar Group. “We recognised that simply upgrading the bandwidth would not improve application performance over the WAN as the issue was due to file latency.”

Al Abbar conducted an evaluation of the Riverbed Steelhead appliances at its datacentre and head office. The results were impressive, with the download time for a 10MB document reduced from five minutes to 40 seconds.

“We chose Riverbed because of its ability to accelerate all of our applications over the WAN. As a result, we’ve made big productivity gains with employees no longer waiting to access key applications,” said Gopalakrishnan. “This has removed the frustration they were experiencing before we introduced Riverbed. You can’t put a price on happy employees.”