Pumpkin Patch Deploys Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed Technology has announced that Pumpkin Patch has deployed a range of Riverbed (News - Alert) Steelhead appliances at its headquarters in New Zealand and also in the regional offices in the United Kingdom and the United States.

 

Pumpkin Patch is a children’s fashion company. The organization has a presence in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, U.S., Asia, and the Middle East, and has more than 3,000 employees.

 

The company employs a centralized IT architecture, according to Leeann McCallum, communications manager at Pumpkin Patch. This kind of architecture means that all applications and data are hosted in New Zealand.

 

“This architecture unfortunately meant all users outside New Zealand were at the mercy of slow WAN application performance,” said McCallum.

 

There were growing complaints of terrible performance when using basic applications such as e-mail and the corporate intranet.

 

Initially, the company thought of re-architecting its network and employing a more distributed architecture for its business systems. However, after a cost-benefit analysis, the company realized a better solution was available.

 

McCallum said that the company realized that it could retain the benefits of its existing centralized architecture and speed up application performance across the WAN by the use of WAN optimization.

 

She added that selecting Riverbed was an easy choice, adding that the company offered Pumpkin Patch a live network trial of the Steelhead appliances before purchase.

 

The Steelhead appliances have slashed global wide area network (WAN) traffic. Pumpkin Patch believes that the application has improved the application performance experienced at its UK and U.S. offices, and thereby significantly improved staff productivity.

 

Pumpkin Patch began a three-month trial of the Steelhead appliances in March. And during this trial period, the company said that the application response time increased, with users in the UK and the U.S. seeing increases of 56 percent and 60 percent, respectively.

 

The actual deployment was done in June. McCallum said that the actual installation process was so easy that “we could just get someone onsite to plug them in. This simplicity saved us a lot of time and real money in IT staff and support costs.”

 

Commenting on Riverbed Central Management Console, she said that from a management perspective, the Central Management Console is an effective way to keep tabs on how the Steelhead appliances are performing. In addition, it also helps in keeping a check on the level and type of traffic traveling across the WAN.

 

Pumpkin Patch indicated that it’s considering other products from Riverbed, such as the Steelhead Mobile client software for remote and traveling users.