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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News -
Networking:
Packeteer Helps Financial Group
Save More Than $500,000/Year
Packeteer Inc, a leading provider of application traffic management
solutions,
announced that LandAmerica Financial Group, a leading provider of real estate
transaction services, estimates $500,000 in annual savings on bandwidth costs,
improved customer satisfaction and greatly increased application performance
since deploying Packeteer's solutions.
LandAmerica represents the third largest family of title underwriters in
the
United States, providing title insurance and real estate-related products and
services on commercial and residential transactions throughout North America
and the Caribbean.
The company's IT department needed visibility into all WAN traffic, the
ability to give priority to time critical applications and the ability to
compress data to enhance overall traffic throughput. LandAmerica found a
complete solution in Packeteer. Since deploying Packeteer at a cost of
approximately $200,000, LandAmerica has avoided more than $500,000 in
bandwidth upgrade costs and experienced clear application performance
improvement resulting in increased end-user satisfaction.
Business has continued to grow for the company, which was established more
than 125 years ago. This growth has sparked an increasing dependence on the
WAN for communications. But optimizing the performance of business
applications, which must compete constantly with a variety of other WAN
traffic including email and the Internet, is difficult. As the size and
complexity of WAN traffic increased, employees at branch sites experienced
transaction delays because time-sensitive, mission-critical financial
transactions running over Citrix were being squeezed out by competing traffic.
Helpdesk calls were on the rise, and LandAmerica's IT department was tasked
with solving the performance problems.
Packeteer delivers an Application Traffic Management system via intelligent
appliances at the LAN/WAN interface. This helps enterprises maximize IT
investments by aligning network applications and resources with business
needs. The Packeteer system protects and accelerates key business applications
and controls malicious, recreational and other non-business traffic.
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Quick, Clear ROI
LandAmerica has main sites in Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania and California.
These sites serve a variety of applications to more than 10,000 employees at
700 remote sites via frame-relay and ATM connections. The company's remote
site WAN links vary between 256K to DS3. LandAmerica's total bandwidth
investment is more than $1 million per month.
"We're saving approximately $50,000 per month on bandwidth using Packeteer,
and that's a modest estimate," said LandAmerica security and systems engineer
Matt Matin. "There's not another piece of hardware or software that we've
bought that gives us that kind of cost avoidance and return on investment.
Everything else provides connectivity from point A to point B, but Packeteer
truly makes the environment better and saves the company money."
Visibility Into WAN Traffic
Prior to the Packeteer deployment, critical application response times were
slow. No one knew why.
"We couldn't put a finger on the problem," said WAN design architect Lou
Prestipino. "After the Packeteer deployment, we saw it all. NetBIOS, FTP and
other important, but not time-sensitive, applications were running rampant
over the financial transaction applications delivered over Citrix, crushing
the sessions and delaying transactions."
"In addition, KaZaA, Gnutella, Doom and other apps were all there.
Packeteer's
reports told us what was being used and who was using it," said Matin. "It
gave us a good picture of what was running on our network and a clear roadmap
for how we could realign application performance with our business needs."
Control Of Application Performance
Having gained visibility into the traffic on the WAN, LandAmerica applied
Packeteer's bandwidth management technology to give high priority to critical
applications and control or block non-business applications.
"If I turned off shaping, the burst would go anywhere up to 80-90 percent
of
the pipe, but the average would be about 25 percent," Matin said. "Applying
policies and partitions to our traffic gave the most time-sensitive and
critical applications the resources they needed to meet their response-time
requirements."
Data Compression To Enhance Throughput
In addition to Packeteer's monitoring and bandwidth management
capabilities,
LandAmerica has also seen benefits from the system's compression features.
"Our dealer, Combyte, brought in two units with compression for us to test.
We
compressed the traffic from one application 25-30Mb down to 12Mb. The
complaints stopped. We're getting anywhere between 25 and 70 percent bandwidth
savings, with an overall average of about 40 to 50 percent. It works better
the more data you throw at it," Matin said. "We are planning to shape and
compress more traffic as we go along and possibly purchase Packeteer for every
Core and Distribution site and are continuing to broaden the deployment."
Matin now plans to compress mainstream traffic between the company's two
main
data centers. "There's a tremendous amount of traffic there," he said. "We're
going to be compressing everything from DCOM to Citrix to imaging to
HTTP."
Convergence On The Horizon
LandAmerica recently purchased a company called InfoOne, which will be
integrated with its broader portfolio of companies as "LandAmerica InfoOne."
Prestipino said he plans to roll out an IP telephony solution at the new
sites, and to ensure quality of those calls with Packeteer. Packeteer's
ability to identify and protect sensitive voice traffic will ensure that calls
are clear and consistent.
"I plan to install a Packeteer solution for that entire network to control
their voice traffic over IP," said Prestipino. "Packeteer's ability to
classify and control IP telephony traffic is unmatched anywhere in the
industry -- period."
"LandAmerica's deployment demonstrates the cost and performance-based
benefits
of taking a broader systems approach to application performance," said
Franklyn Jones, director of solutions marketing for Packeteer. "The
combination of visibility, control and compression offers clear benefits over
any of the technologies deployed alone, and gives customers the information
and control they need to align application performance with business
objectives."
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