Bandwidth for Exploration of Oil and Gas Unlocked by Ophir Energy for Riverbed

The Riverbed (News - Alert) wide area network, or WAN optimization technology, has been deployed by Ophir Energy, an international oil and gas exploration company based in the UK. The technology has helped save thousands of dollars worth of equipment and WAN support costs annually that connect the African, Australian and European offices of the company. Furthermore, Ophir Energy has also seen a speed up in the performance of its applications that enables quick access to its global business critical information. The Steelhead Mobile and Steelhead appliances from Riverbed are the two main technologies used.

With the deployment of the Steelhead appliances by Riverbed in Perth, London, Malabo, Mtwara and other offshore drilling vessels, Riverbed has enhanced the IP-WAN and VSAT or Very Small Aperture Terminal satellite links up to five times more. Ophir networks can thereby utilize these expanded networks to deliver data backup operations across its worldwide operations to a central data center. The networks performance constraints were also eliminated by the Steelhead appliances and mobile.

In a release, the IT manager at Ophir Energy, Bill Johnson said that, “The performance improvements delivered by Riverbed were immediate and impressive. Steelhead Mobile has allowed some of our laptop users to reduce their WAN bandwidth consumption by more than 80 percent. Riverbed WAN optimization is the right solution to meet our technical and financial needs. We expect to recoup our investment in the Riverbed solution from the bandwidth savings alone.”

Johnson also said that, “The performance delivered by Riverbed allows all our staff to connect to a single shared mailbox on our central Exchange server, which ensures that important messages and documents are logged correctly and never lost. Similarly, by enabling us to use Windows file-shares across the WAN, we've been able to save scanned image data from all our scanners globally to a central file folder in Perth. This simplifies administration, and the Steelhead appliances provide remote users LAN-like access to even the largest scanned images from anywhere. In the same way, we can have a single library of company-wide documents on a file-share in Perth available to all users worldwide, or a single folder of Microsoft (News - Alert) Office templates shared globally.”

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