Turley Associates is the UK’s leading independent planning and urban design consultancy, operating nationally, regionally and locally from a network of nine offices. It currently has 140 members of staff, 86 of whom are chartered planners and 25 of whom are qualified urban designers. IT systems were based upon an MPLS Wide Area Network (WAN) centralised at the Manchester Head Office with varying bandwidths depending on site.
BACKGROUND
Turley Associates had been suffering for some time with delays on the WAN when using centralised large files including CAD Files. This was seen as a major issue for the business as it was adversely impacting the company’s productivity. Implementing Riverbed also enabled Turley’s to deploy Microsoft SharePoint allowing all files to be managed centrally throughout the WAN.
APPROACH
The WAN had previously been upgraded to provide additional bandwidth over MPLS and though this helped generally it did not resolve the CAD File issues. SICL recommended Turley’s use a ‘Try and Buy’evaluation of the Riverbed Steelhead appliances to improve its WAN optimsation with regard to large files, particularly CAD Files.
RESULTS
The Riverbed Steelhead Appliances were installed on sites and immediate improvement was observed. With WAN operations such as opening, editing and closing complex documentation, which had previously taken upwards of 20 minutes per document and in some cases longer, now completing in seconds. Riverbed also provided informative statistics on bandwidth utilisation and optimisation.Bandwidth utilisation which had been running almost consistantly at a maximum and creating latency issues had been reduced by over 80%.
“SICL's recommendation to install Riverbed technology has greatly improved our productivity and their approach has confirmed to us that they are definitely the best company for us to use as a technology partner”
Liam Diamond
Turley Associates, IT Director