Santa Clara, Calif., May 15 , 2007 – Silver Peak Systems , a leading provider of scalable Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration solutions, today announced that Devine, Millimet & Branch, P.A. one of the largest law firms in Northern New England, has chosen Silver Peak to overcome high WAN bandwidth costs while improving the performance of key collaboration tools, including file, email, document management and time and billing applications based on the Structured Query Language (SQL).
“Populating mail and other user directories in remote sites was somewhat painful,” said Bob Dubois, IT director at Devine, Millimet & Branch and vice president of the voice and data communications peer group for the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA). “Silver Peak enabled us to keep these applications centrally located, without suffering from poor performance across the WAN. By increasing productivity and reducing both hardware and telecom costs, we estimate an eight-month return on our Silver Peak investment.”
Making the Case
Like most legal firms, Devine, Millimet & Branch is very focused on the bottom line, always striving to provide better IT services at the lowest possible cost. As part of this philosophy, the firm centralized key application servers within its main facility in New Hampshire, including Microsoft file and email, Worldox for document management, Sage Carpe Diem for time entry and Elite® Billing Manager™. For disaster recovery purposes, all voice and data traffic is backed up across the WAN to Andover, Massachusetts using Evault’s Infostage.
Devine, Millimet & Branch looked to Silver Peak after the firm’s initial foray into WAN acceleration was unsuccessful at delivering adequate application performance across their WAN. There were inherent limitations in the first platform they deployed, particularly with respect to TCP flows.
“We did not account for the fact that each user has five to six applications open at a time, each of which requires several sessions,” said Dubois. “Before we knew it, we were beyond the flow limits of our WAN optimization appliances, which left large portions of our traffic un-optimized between locations.”
To add insult to injury, Devine, Millimet & Branch’s first WAN acceleration vendor also wanted to charge the firm exorbitant professional services fees to configure support for MS project and other SQL traffic. This led the firm to explore other alternatives, which resulted in the selection and deployment of Silver Peak’s NX appliances.
With Silver Peak in place, Devine, Millimet & Branch is seeing four to 13 times average improvement in email traffic, with data reduction exceeding 92 percent across the WAN. Users are experiencing a 17 times improvement in file transfers and document sharing using Microsoft CIFS, with 94 percent average data reduction on the WAN. The firm also saw an immediate “out of the box” performance improvement on its SQL traffic, including a 62 percent average reduction in WAN traffic when performing normal read/write operations. Backup traffic is routinely seeing close to 20 percent data reduction across the WAN (above and beyond the de-duplication capabilities already within the Evault application).
“Devine, Millimet & Branch is an excellent example of a forward looking company implementing WAN acceleration as an integral part of the firm’s network infrastructure,” said Jeff Aaron, Director of marketing at Silver Peak. “With Silver Peak’s NX appliances, the firm has achieved significant performance improvements across a wide range of disparate applications, ensuring successful server centralization and secure and reliable disaster recovery.”
About Devine, Millimet & Branch
Devine, Millimet & Branch is one of the largest firms in Northern New England, attracting sophisticated and interesting work from national, regional and local companies. The firm began in New Hampshire almost 60 years ago and today provides a full array of legal services, ranging from complex commercial litigation and corporate work, to an innovative pro bono initiative.
About Silver Peak Systems, Inc.
Silver Peak improves backup, replication and recovery between data centers and facilitates branch office server and storage centralization by improving application performance across the Wide Area Network (WAN). The company’s award winning NX appliances deliver exceptional performance improvements with unprecedented security and scalability across all enterprise applications, including data replication, backup, file transfers, email, web and real-time applications such as Citrix and VoIP. For more information, visit http://www.silver-peak.com/infocenter
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