case study- wood bagot

8/6/2019 Case Study- Wood Bagot

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Case Study: WAN Optimization Enables Global Design Firm to Share CAD/VisualizationFiles and Collaborate Live Over Internet

This document details an example of a global design service provider using wide-area network(WAN) optimization to enable live multisite collaboration and remote access to its large graphic filesand documentation through a direct connection to the Internet. This approach not only enabled the

company Woods Bagot to avoid significant bandwidth upgrade costs, but also increased overallusage of the network, thereby improving the IT teams reputation with both employees andmanagement.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

WAN optimization technology can be a good choice for organizations facing challenges withapplication performance. As design firm Woods Bagot found, significant application performancechallenges can be overcome without spending any more on WAN links. The savings are usually sogreat that payback for the upfront cost of deploying WOCs can be had in as little as a few months. As aresult, this technology helps IT staff win the confidence of both users and management.

Introduction

Woods Bagot, a global architecture design practice, has over 1,000 employees across fiveregions and three customer segments: Education and Science, Lifestyle and Workplace. Among thewell-known projects to its name are ones for The University of Hong Kong, Qatar Science & TechnologyPark, and Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Woods Bagot aims to be a global leader indesign and consulting, differentiating itself from others by utilizing a global talent pool that collaboratesseamlessly across different locations. It is important for it to have the right people working on the rightproject. This helps its workers do a good job. It also helps the company attract and retain the creamof the crop. Woods Bagots IT team, which had been entrusted to support the organizations businessobjectives, had undertaken a major revamp of the companys entire IT setup, including an ERP and

CRM implementation and deployment of a Microsoft SharePoint-based intranet to improve knowledgesharing and employee collaboration.

The Challenge

Woods Bagots employees access and use their intranet and corporate applications throughdirect-to-net virtual private network (VPN) connectivity over Ethernet Internet access. The nature ofthe work done by Woods Bagot required the transfer of large CAD files and documentation across the

VPN. These files would take several minutes to download, hampering the ability of Woods Bagotsglobally dispersed team to work live on design projects time lags meant coordination problems inrelation to when a team in one location had finished working on files and teams elsewhere could startworking on those same files. The back-and-forth transfer of huge files over the Internet link also hadan impact on other corporate applications, such as ERP, CRM and e-mail/Internet access: the graphic-heavy traffic grabbed all the bandwidth it could, clogging the path for all other traffic.

To make things even more challenging, a requirement was emerging to support time-sensitivetraffic including voice telephony, videoconferencing and a newly deployed Windows Media streamingapplication across the WAN. One way to meet this need would have been to deploy significant extrabandwidth at considerable cost, but the IT team did not believe that adding bandwidth would solve all


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Woods Bagots issues. Lack of visibility into the network would remain, hindering the companys abilityto reserve enough bandwidth for crucial business applications and to limit the bandwidth consumed byless important traffic.

As things stood, the companys problems with application performance were having a bad effecton employees and management. Employees productivity suffered as a result of long wait timesbetween downloads indirectly lowering their morale, too. Even more importantly, the management

had come to view IT as a barrier to the businesss growth and potential to meet objectives.

Approach

In 2007, Woods Bagot brought new thinking to its IT, with the backing of its IT leaders and thecompanys senior management. The IT team set out to challenge the status quo and approach the ITchallenges with a fresh approach, which included embracing alternatives if they made business sense.To address the application performance issues, Woods Bagot needed a solution that could address theorganizations specific requirements, based on the state of its current applications, the highly-meshednetwork access profile of its users, and cost constraints. After the initial months of assessment, the IT

team had several options to consider.

Increasing bandwidth at the sites was one obvious option. However, this would mean spendingsignificant additional sums of money since the places where additional bandwidth was required studiosites in Dubai and Abu Dhabi are regulated markets with monopolistic tariff regimes. Upgrading from6-Mbps links to 10-Mbps links would have cost more than an additional $40,000 per month for thesetwo locations alone. Also, there was no guarantee that adding bandwidth would solve the applicationperformance problems, and the IT team firmly believed that lack of bandwidth was only one of thefactors impacting application performance.

Another option that was considered was to deploy a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)Internet Protocol (IP) VPN. But this was again too costly. With the budget available, only a 2-Mbps

connection was possible for Woods Bagot, and even that would be over $35,000 per month more thanthe companys existing spending. Another key reason for not using MPLS was the need to upload anddownload large files to and from third-party websites. MPLS would not enable this to be doneefficiently, since it did not provide direct Internet access from all branch offices. In this context, it madesense for the company to continue using direct-to- Internet connections to ensure quick online accessto these third party resources. Another inhibitor to using MPLS was its lack of QoS capability for thingslike rate limiting, content delivery network (CDN)-boosted Web traffic, and bandwidth prioritization atthe levelof specific applications.

Other options considered were Microsoft Windows Distributed File System (DFS) replications

and application/database centralization. But DFSs lack of network usage efficiency and network layervisibility ruled it out of consideration in the context of direct Internet connectivity. In addition, theoption of centralization was viable onlyfor the intranet that is, for corporate applications and data. For the CAD and visualization files acentralized model was simply not viable: at hundreds of megabytes each, these files were just toolarge. Another obstacle was that Woods Bagots CAD tools were not ready for a centralized databasemodel over a WAN, as they lacked adequate version control features and network optimization for livemultisite collaboration.


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The approach that finally met the IT teams expectations and needs was WAN optimization.With WOCs deployed at each site, the byte caching and redundancy elimination features of theseappliances would enable a remote virtual team to work live on a segment ofa CAD or visualization file residing on a server in another location. In addition, the QoS andacceleration enabled by these appliances would bring to the IT team greater visibility into, and controlover, the overall traffic on the network this could potentially reduce bandwidth contention betweenapplications and users, and significantly improve the employees satisfaction as application users.

Furthermore, WAN optimization could save the company several thousands of dollars while meeting itsother requirements.

This made it much easier for the IT team to present to senior company managers a case justifying investment in this technology. The next step was to evaluate the best offering available.Woods Bagot approached this issue from three perspectives for the three shortlisted vendors: thevendor, its technology and its relationships with system integrators (SIs):

Riverbed Technology. It was very difficult to talk to them, according to the Woods Bagot ITteam, which also felt this vendors offering was oversold, with too many SIs and nodifferentiation. From a product perspective, Wood Bagot considered Riverbeds caching very

good but its QoS lacking. There was an additional charge for a softWOC client, and the overallprice seemed expensive. Exinda. Woods Bagot thought this vendor had a good product and reasonably priced. But the

vendors financial viability was a major cause for concern. Blue Coat Systems. Acceleration of CIFS [Common Internet File System] and HTTPS traffic,

along with greater visibility of network, and the ability to do the best QoS, was what convincedus about their solution, said Nectarios Lazaris, Woods Bagots group IT operations manager.More importantly for Lazaris and his IT team, it was Blue Coats availability and willingness torise to the occasion with its own engineers and those of its SIs that really differentiated it fromRiverbed and Exinda. It also helped that Blue Coats prices were affordable.

Results

Woods Bagot chose Blue Coat as its WAN optimization vendor. Woods Bagot has completed aparallel deployment of Blue Coat ProxySG and PacketShaper appliances in each of its 16 globallocations. The PacketShaper appliances monitor the applications crossing the WAN and the Internetgateways, applying compression and QoS to ensure network availability and maintain policy-basedusage. They work in conjunction with the ProxySG appliances that apply WAN optimizationtechnologies to mission-critical applications, such as file transfer using CIFS and the moving of largevisualization files.

Technical Results

Before deploying WOCs, Woods Bagots sharing of large CAD, visualization and documentationfiles through FTP was extremely slow, and through CIFS it was almost impossible. With CIFS protocoland FTP optimization, together with features like byte caching and redundancy elimination, livemultisite collaboration became a reality and is now working well.

With the implementation of QoS and application acceleration, the performance of corporateapplications such as ERP, e-mail and the SharePoint intranet also improved significantly. Limitations onthe centralized deployment of these were removed and applications


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case study- wood bagot

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