Stena Drills Reduces Bandwidth and IT Infrastructure Costs

Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology, an IT infrastructure providing and network performance improving company, announced the operation of its Riverbed and Steelhead devices and Steelhead Mobile at a number of offshore and on shore locations of Stena Drilling.

 

The installation of the devices will enable Stena to conserve costs that would otherwise be spent on expensive IT infrastructure and bandwidth augmentation funding. According to company officials, the installation has bettered the file loading capabilities by 30 percent and improved the interaction between the staff at various facilities.

 

Riverbed Technology is engaged in providing solutions to improve the IT infrastructure performance. The solutions enable the business enterprises to overcome the restrictions posed by IT infrastructure by improved performance without any investment on augmented bandwidth and server storage. Riverbed solutions allow the companies to have quicker responding faster communication solutions with least investment.

 

Stenna Drilling is one of the group companies of Stena AB a drilling contracting company from Sweden. The company has it head offices at Scotland and operate its offshore rigs at different locations all over the world. Earlier to the installation of Riverbed Technology communication devices, Stena was spending considerable amount of investment on satellite communications and was not able to utilize the available bandwidth even after introducing a data priority setting system for e-mail and VoIP.

 

In order to overcome the multi-location and slower bandwidth problems faced by Stena, EssentialNet a reseller and Zycko, distributor of Riverbed Corporation recommended WAN optimization solutions. The solution includes utilizing a blend of Riverbed Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobiles devices in the WAN. After the successful testing of communication installations between its headquarters and one of its rigs at North Sea, Stena ordered for the setting up Steelhead devices in all its nine rigs all over the world.     

 

Ian Fraser, IT manager at Stena, said that prior to the installation of the Steelhead appliances, the company was looking at increasing its bandwidth from a 512Kbps connection to a 1Mbps connection.

 

“This would have almost doubled our IT infrastructure costs. Riverbed is one of the few technologies we've found that has helped us to cut overall IT infrastructure costs while improving overall employee productivity and collaboration,” Fraser said. “We're extremely pleased with these results.”