Expand Networks Wins Oil & Gas Giant and Delivers Superior Virtualization Experience for Enhanced Business Productivity

Expand Networks www.expand.com, the leader in optimizing WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualization, today announced that Jim Woods Marketing, the Oil & Gas delivery company, has deployed Expand Networks’ WAN Optimization technology to accelerate the delivery of its business applications following a VMware project. By deploying Expand Networks’ Virtual Accelerator in the datacenter, Jim Woods has realized the true value of its virtualized environment, successfully stretching its existing network investment and placing its workforce in virtual proximity of its applications and datacenter services to maximize business productivity.
Headquartered in a remote corner of Oklahoma, Jim Woods has a small team of experts facilitating a very high volume of deliveries and fiscal results. Operating in the fast-moving logistics industry, and compounded by its isolated location, quick communications and reliable connectivity is critical to success. In particular, the company relies on efficient access to the specialist logistics application AIS, which is particularly bandwidth intensive. Following a virtualization project, IT director, John Parnell, quickly found that as the users became physically separated from the applications and services they required to do their jobs, performance became a big issue. He explains;
“Uptime is critical to maximize productivity, but with the virtualization project holding the business data over 100 miles away, the users relying on the WAN for their data were faced with latency and congestion challenges that seriously began to compromise business efficiency. Bandwidth was inconsistent and choppy and the application performance was not good enough to enable optimum productivity. It quickly became clear we couldn’t have virtualization without a complementary optimization strategy.”
Researching the marketplace and consulting the VMware community portal, Parnell evaluated Riverbed and Expand Networks. On receiving Expand Networks’ virtual equipment for testing, Parnell said, “Being able to evaluate the product in the environment made it easy to see the benefits in performance.” Parnell chose to implement Expand’s Virtual Accelerator for its ability to operate in the virtual environment and do so at a compelling price point with low TCO.
Expand’s Virtual Accelerator for virtualized datacenter environments delivers the most advanced levels of VMware integration of any leading WAN optimization vendor in the market today. This enables Jim Woods’ to utilize VMware’s suite of services to deploy, manage, maintain and assure the Virtual Accelerator within the virtualized infrastructure.
Using techniques such as byte-level caching and dynamic compression, the Virtual Accelerator is delivering a superior end user experience for Jim Woods by ensuring fast and secure access to the centrally located data. Expand’s layer 7 QoS (Quality of Service) is also supporting the company’s SIP calls, which were previously prone to packet loss and jitter, ensuring all voice traffic has the protected bandwidth it needs.
According to Parnell, the Virtual Accelerator’s compression and acceleration techniques quickly delivered the bandwidth increase required. He concludes, “The Accelerator has significantly improved user productivity and business efficiency at the company. The performance of our applications is significantly quicker, translating into a better experience for the users.
“Monitoring tells us that Expand is delivering four times the bandwidth on the same infrastructure we had before – the benefits of what Expand call ‘virtual bandwidth’ are clear. As a test, we can even run and watch YouTube files over the links in real time, something we could never have done previously. I have already recommended the technology to my colleagues working in large organizations across the industry.”
Adam Davison, Corporate VP Sales & Marketing comments, “The Virtual Accelerator enables accelerated delivery and guaranteed performance of business critical applications and services within all virtualized WAN environments. Deployed in the datacenter, as Jim Woods’ has done, it is proven to provide rapid ROI and lower TCO. Competitive solutions still deploy physical appliances running proprietary software, and then run VMware on top, which adds complexity and often the requirement for additional appliances for the user. With Expand’s integrated approach, the Virtual Accelerator is a truly virtualized appliance; there are no additional ‘redundant’ license costs and users are able to extract the maximum benefit from a virtualized environment.”