Grupo Paranapanema Centralizes IT with Riverbed

Grupo Paranapanema has implemented Riverbed Steelhead appliances in its five industrial plants.

Riverbed (News - Alert) claims this deployment has improved the performance of Grupo Paranapanema’s mission-critical applications by 5X and reduced its backup windows by 10X. The Group also managed to avoid bandwidth upgrades of over $200,000 per year with this implementation.

Thanks to Riverbed, the Group has centralized their IT infrastructure without sacrificing remote employee productivity and user satisfaction, as well as improve its overall disaster recovery processes.

Grupo Paranapanema has five industrial plants in the States of São Paulo, Bahia, and Espírito Santo. They were looking to support the implementation of an ERP system, and thus decided upon a centralization project that moved its business-critical data to its data center located in São Paulo.

But this consolidation of data did not work and instead caused long e-mail and file sharing delays for the employees. Observing these problems, the Group's IT department decided to update its links in the remote sites.

Roberto Orrico, infrastructure coordinator of the Group said that they expected the cost of more bandwidth to be very high in light of the current design of their WAN MPLS, with two links in each site for backup and load balancing.

The Group also realized that additional bandwidth wouldn't solve the latency problems that were core to the performance issues. They began to search the market for alternative solutions and came across Riverbed WAN optimization technology.

The solution was presented to them by Ímpar Soluções em TI, an integrator partner of Grupo Paranapanema and an expert in information security and IT infrastructure. Orrico saw Riverbed’s position in the market and decided to test the Steelhead appliances.

They were impressed by a successful free trial, supported by the distributor Allier, and then decided to implement the solution in its five industrial plants. The deployment has delivered a number of benefits to the Group including a reduction in bandwidth utilization.