Mammoet deploys Riverbed in data centres

Mammoet, a provider of heavy lifting and transport solutions, has successfully deployed 65 Riverbed Steelhead appliances across its three data centres in Europe, Asia and the United States, and across all of its branch offices.

By deploying Riverbed’s WAN optimisation solution, Mammoet was able to successfully and intelligently implement a major IT consolidation project, while also dramatically improving access to business-critical applications that are located in the company’s private cloud infrastructure.  With Riverbed, Mammoet moved the data to the data centre, removed 24 local servers and reduced its bandwidth utilisation by 3x, while at the same time decreasing IT costs, improving employee productivity, accelerating disaster recovery, and speeding up customer service calls.

With the goal of simplifying IT management and reducing costs, Mammoet planned to consolidate its IT infrastructure into a private cloud by replacing dozens of local servers with three data centres located in Europe, Asia and the United States.  In order to ensure application performance and speed the replication of data between data centres for DR, Mammoet worked with its technology partners to test a number of potential WAN optimisation offerings.  After reviewing a number of options, it quickly became clear that Riverbed was the right choice.

“From the tests, it was apparent that Steelhead appliances were really easy to configure—this was one of the most important reasons for choosing Riverbed,” said Harger Brasjen, ICT/infrastructure manager at Mammoet.  “You unpack the Steelhead appliance, give it a network address and it works!  The other alternatives were more trouble when it came to configuration. During the trials, some vendors spent two days setting up their systems while Riverbed was finished in an hour.”

Mammoet installed 65 Riverbed Steelhead appliances across its data centres and branch offices, which allowed the company to move the data from its remote sites, as well as reduce management and IT maintenance costs across the organisation—all in addition to deferring bandwidth upgrades in a centralised infrastructure.  The company also quickly recognized a massive reduction in data traffic for DR replication by 78%, CIFS by 66%, and Microsoft Outlook by 73%.

In addition, Mammoet deployed the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC), which enables Mammoet to deploy, configure and manage the Steelhead appliances in geographically dispersed locations from a central location. Due to the global nature of its business, Mammoet also opted to deploy the Riverbed Steelhead Mobile solution to ensure that its mobile workers could access files and data as quickly and easily as their branch office colleagues.  The Steelhead Mobile solution has also been deployed for offices with less than five employees as a cost-efficient way to deliver local area network (LAN)-like speeds to smaller branch offices.

“Riverbed’s WAN optimisation solutions have given us the platform we need to understand, optimise and consolidate our IT operations into a private cloud architecture, which has helped us build a faster, more dynamic IT infrastructure that really aligns with our business goals and needs,” explained Brasjen.  “Our global employees are now productive no matter where they are in the world, which gives us a real competitive edge. Riverbed has truly provided us with a range of solutions to meet our needs for both today and tomorrow.”

Mammoet is a specialist in customised heavy lifting and transport solutions for onshore and offshore locations with 3,500 employees and approximately 60 offices worldwide in the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. In the Middle East Mammoet Gulf has a regional head office based in Dubai (UAE) with branch offices in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Mammoet Gulf is also working in Oman, Kuwait, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain, India, Mauritius, East Africa and Caspian.