Charity speeds up network for remote offices

Conservation charity the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) has centralised its IT management and cut maintenance costs by a quarter using network acceleration technology.

The charity, the largest of its kind in the UK, has nine remote offices, and found that staff productivity was suffering from the slow performance of its wide area network (Wan).

The Wan had limited connectivity and WWT relied on local servers at each office to ensure that critical applications performed satisfactorily.

‘Most of our remote offices are out in the wilds and a long way from telephone exchanges required for getting broadband. So we had to restrict network data transfer to email traffic,’ said Ian Wood, Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust IT manager.

‘We also had a situation with roaming profiles, where staff visiting other offices experienced painfully slow systems when they tried to access them.

‘Despite the bandwidth restrictions, latency was killing the speed of file transfers,’ he said.

WWT has installed Steelhead Wan accelerator appliances from specialist supplier Riverbed across its offices.

The technology has allowed the charity to decommission remote servers and run the infrastructure directly from the main server at its Slimbridge headquarters in Gloucestershire, cutting maintenance costs by 25 per cent.

‘We are enjoying the benefits of a simplified IT infrastructure, particularly as all the servers are now in one place,’ said Wood. ‘And it has increased application and data processing speeds 100 times over.’

Jon Collins, analyst at researcher Quocirca, said: ‘Until three years ago the perception was that if you can’t do what

you want with your current IT provision, throw more at it. So enterprises would just buy more storage, bandwidth and servers.

‘Since the economic downturn, the focus has shifted to efficiency and consolidation.

‘I think everyone should be doing this. There is huge potential for products such as these in the enterprise.’