Mountain View, CA, September 18, 2006 – Silver Peak Systems (www.silver-peak.com), a leading provider of scalable Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration appliances, today announced that Ivey, a premier provider of innovative and high impact visual imaging and branding solutions for the retail industry has deployed Silver Peak NX appliances. With Silver Peak, Ivey is able to pool creative resources across multiple offices and simultaneously improve the efficiency of manufacturing operations across their corporate facilities. By improving WAN performance between geographically disperse locations throughout North America, Ivey can better balance human resources while avoiding the duplication of expensive equipment between specialized manufacturing sites. This improves all aspects of the company’s business – from project management and production design to printing and finishing – while saving Ivey millions of dollars in capital expenditures and hardware maintenance costs.
Visualizing the Problem
Ivey provides end-to-end capabilities across the U.S. to deliver high-impact visual solutions and in-store branding to leading retail customers such as adidas, Panera and Starbucks. To achieve this, the company has manufacturing operations in Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles, and satellite sales offices in Atlanta, Dallas and Memphis. An additional collocation facility in Seattle is used for disaster recovery. To minimize costs and to capitalize on labor, Ivey made a strategic decision to share their specialized technology across manufacturing locations. Screen printing, for example, takes place in California, while premedia and photography technology and services primarily reside in Portland.
“By utilizing the same pieces of hardware across all Ivey locations, we can sell and develop our services from any office without having to purchase millions of dollars worth of equipment and maintenance contracts for each location,” said Cary Dahl, IT manager at Ivey. “However, this put us at the mercy of our WAN. Slow file transfers were becoming our single biggest roadblock to productivity, limiting our ability to collaborate across teams in multiple offices, and impacting our ability to maintain real-time backups up client information.”
Ivey employees typically transfer Gigabytes of data across the WAN each day, including hundreds of .pdf files and .jpg images that are used in the design and production of retail displays and packaging for companies like Panera. The company does extensive file sharing using a variety of protocols, including Microsoft CIFS, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and Apple File Protocol (AFP), while also relying on Microsoft email for office communications.
Designing a Solution
The company explored traditional WAN compression and traffic shaping as a way of solving their WAN performance problems, but was underwhelmed by the results. Since many of the files being transferred were already pre-compressed, these solutions had little effect. They started to look at Wide Area File Services (WAFS), but were put off by the management complexity, and the inability to handle non-file applications, such as email, web, Voice over IP (VoIP), and videoconferencing.
After evaluating a variety of solutions, Ivey saw the biggest performance improvements with Silver Peak’s NX appliances. 50 MB files that used to take 5 minutes to transfer across the WAN were reduced to a few seconds after the initial transfer– a 60x improvement in application performance. This was primarily due to Silver Peak’s Network Memory™ technology, which uses data reduction to eliminate the transfer of duplicate data across the WAN. With Network Memory, Ivey now eliminates the bulk of their WAN traffic, consistently delivering a 3x increase in effective WAN capacity.
“Silver Peak has everything we are looking for in a WAN acceleration solution, allowing our teams to collaborate more effectively while sharing expensive machinery across all of our offices,” said Dahl. “In addition to delivering extensive performance improvements for our file and email traffic, they have the QoS capabilities that will enable us to better support voice across our WAN in the near future. The fact that the Silver Peak solution can grow with our evolving application needs really made the difference.”
By improving WAN performance between geographically disperse locations, Ivey can better balance human resources while avoiding the duplication of expensive equipment between specialized manufacturing sites. This improves all aspects of the company’s business – from project management and production design to printing and finishing – while saving Ivey millions of dollars in capital expenditures and hardware maintenance costs.
About Ivey
For over 30 years Ivey has built a strong reputation as a nationally recognized professional services company. Ivey provides solutions for creating and producing innovative visual imaging campaigns for some of the most powerful retail brands in the country. Ivey’s customers include; adidas, Coldwater Creek, Columbia Sportswear, Eddie Bauer, Nike, Nordstrom, Panera Bread Company, REI, Starbucks, Northface and Taco Del Mar.
About Silver Peak Systems, Inc .
Silver Peak facilitates the centralization of servers and storage by improving application performance across a Wide Area Network (WAN). With the company’s award winning NX family of WAN acceleration appliances, enterprises can improve disaster recovery in data centers and reduce “server sprawl” in branch and remote offices. Silver Peak delivers exceptional, transparent performance improvements for 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
NOTE: Silver Peak Systems, the Silver Peak logo, Network Memory and Silver Peak NX Series are trademarks of Silver Peak Systems, Inc.