Download Viridor improves application performance even at their

SUCCESS
STORY
Viridor improves application performance
even at their remote locations
www.ipanematech.com
AT A GLANCE
COMPANY
INDUSTRY
Viridor is one of the UK’s leading recycling, waste management and renewable energy
Recycling, renewable energy and
waste management
companies.
Part of the FTSE 250 Pennon Group, Viridor provides the full range of recycling and
COMPANY
waste services including advanced materials recycling, glass reprocessing,
3,000+ employees
composting, mechanical/biological treatment, waste to energy, transport, collection,
150 sites
and safe and efficient landfill disposal. The company handles more than 10.5 million
tonnes of material each year, recycling approx two million tonnes and generating 101
CRITICAL APPLICATIONS
megawatts of renewable energy.
Weighbridge application
ERP
File sharing
CHALLENGE
Viridor’s facilities are often located in remote areas, so providing bandwidth to
disparate sites can be a costly challenge as there is generally poor telecoms
Microsoft Office
CHALLENGES
infrastructure. “We were acquiring new sites and discovering that providing a decent
amount of bandwidth could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, which could not
be justified for the services that needed to be provided,” said Simon Hill, Head of ICT,
Providing bandwidth to remote
locations
Viridor. Low bandwidth was another challenge for Viridor, so they wanted to find a
solution that would help them both prioritize and optimise performance of their critical
Visibility of application
performance
applications, as well as make better use of available bandwidth. Another key issue for
Viridor was a lack of visibility into what was happening on its network. If performance
CHOOSING IPANEMA
Ability to configure applications
according to their priority
issues occurred, the core ICT service centre in Taunton would receive incoming calls
from different sites. When a user reported poor application response time, it was very
hard for Viridor’s ICT team to identify the source of the problem. Viridor’s network is
provided by Cable&Wireless Worldwide but the general network level reports Viridor
OBESERVED BENEFITS
received only showed there was a problem, not the detail required to identify why the
Prioritization of business-critical
applications
problem had occurred.
Ensuring application performance
At one landfill site in Devon, Viridor operates a specialist Weighbridge system which
controls two separate Weighbridges which are critical to the running of its operations.
Identify trends in bottlenecks
The site also has a meeting room which is often used to host regional management
meetings. Previously, they were limited to a 256k leased line with about 4 or 5 people
usually on-site. Problems would start to occur when meetings were held which would
add additional people with laptops to the site and they would all synchronize offline
Beyond the Network…
folders and send/receive emails, etc. As a result, the critical Weighbridge application
would grind to to a halt, as there was no bandwidth left to run the RDP session which
was required for the weighbridge application. “We would get calls through to our
service desk saying the Weighbridge application had frozen and our staff couldn’t
weigh the vehicles. Consequently the vehicles had to be weighed manually which is
not only time consuming, but also costly,” said Hill. In addition, when the network
became available; the tickets from the manually weighed vehicles would have to be
inputted into the system by hand which could lead to errors.
Ipanema was deployed and managed by C&WW as part of its Application Performance
Management (*APM) service. Viridor has two physical ip|engines, the first at the core
www.ipanematech.com
data centre in Taunton, Somerset and the second at a resilient network path into the
Taunton data centre. It’s so important for Viridor to be able to prioritise its applications it
has built Ipanema into its resiliency plans. Now if the primary data centre network link
Ipanema develops next-generation
solutions for enabling large
enterprises to have full control and
optimization of their global network;
private cloud, public cloud or both.
The Ipanema System unifies
performance across hybrid networks.
It dynamically adapts to whatever is
happening in the traffic and
guarantees constant control of critical
applications. It is the only system with
a central management and reporting
platform that scales to the levels
required by Service Providers and
large enterprises. With solutions used
extensively by many of the world’s
largest telecom providers and
enterprises across business and
public sectors, Ipanema controls and
optimizes over 100,000 sites among
1,000+ customers.
goes down, the redundant, back-up link still has application optimisation embedded.
The remainder of Viridor’s sites are managed by tele|engines.
OBSERVED BENEFITS
“C&WW provides our monthly application reporting metrics which are generated by the
Ipanema system. This really has revolutionized how we manage our network in terms
of visibility,” stated Hill. A resource is dedicated to the account that provides the report.
They will look at a site for example that isn’t meeting Application Quality Scores (AQS)
and then drill down to discover why that’s happening. Viridor can now look at trends
and identify any potential bottlenecks quickly. “The reporting has been extremely
useful. For example, we’ve just started to deploy software using Microsoft Systems
Centre and Software deployment was traditionally tricky with our limited bandwidth. At
the moment we’re rolling out Office 2010 and some sites only have 128k or 256k
leased lines. Actually being able to roll out new software and have limited bandwidth
lines
continue
to
serve
critical
applications
effectively
necessitates
WAN
Governance...” With Ipanema, Viridor has much better visibility and control over its
Ipanema enables any large enterprise
to institute WAN Governance for
aligning and automatically managing
WAN performance according to
business objectives. Ipanema
solutions guarantee business
application performance and
continuity in a cloud computing
world—anytime, anywhere. Using
Ipanema, enterprises:
application performance.
Enable Cloud-Ready Network
to their business strategy.
“For Viridor, Ipanema is all about optimization and visibility, and has been revolutionary
in terms of what it has provided to us as an organization. It really is a step change in
our ability to manage our applications and their performance, and it allows us to
concentrate on the provision of services rather than on the network performance,” said
Hill. Ipanema is key in Viridor’s continual process of improvement. Ipanema
accompanies Viridor in their growth through WAN Governance, aligning their network
Guarantee user experience
Accelerate business
applications
Unify hybrid networks
Save on IT costs
* Cable&Wireless Worldwide Application Performance Management (APM) monitors and
manages your business-critical applications to ensure reliable, optimum performance across the
WAN.
Beyond the Network…