Construction - Case Study: MIVAN
Mivan is an established contracting company which specializes in Interiors, Theming, Property Development and General Contracting. With a head office in Antrim, Northern Ireland, Mivan also has an international presence in Europe, the Middle East and USA.
The Project
Mivan’s requirement was to install a cost-effective solution that would enable them to centralize business-critical documents by introducing a centralized SharePoint server, increasing usability and performance to their different sites using various communications methods, including DSL, 3G and satellite networks. Mivan has sites in Europe, the Middle East and the USA, ranging in size and with varying bandwidth capabilities and also a number of mobile/remote users using cellular networks.
Key Challenges
- To provide LAN-like performance for the roll out of SharePoint as a replacement for onsite file shares.
- To optimize access to a SharePoint server over DSL, 3G and satellite networks, as well as MPLS wide area connections.
- To achieve optimum price/performance and Return on Investment.
- To apply a risk free deployment solution for the organization’s network with significant performance benefits.
- To install an flexible solution that can adapt quickly as an organizations circumstances change.
Operational Challenges
The company had previously tried various solutions for WAN Optimization but global staff had seen no significant performance gains. Current hardware solutions were also unappealing with high initial installation costs being a major stumbling block.
The Solution
Mivan installed the Replify Accelerator Suite for their VPN and remote user requirement.
The Replify Accelerator Suite is an all-software solution for Application Acceleration and WAN Optimization. Deployment of the software was achieved with no disruption or physical network reconfiguration required. With an all-software approach, it was a very simple roll-out using existing infrastructure. This meant that a proof of concept could be run without introducing any risk to the corporate network.
Replify Accelerator outperforms other products currently available with no requirement for proprietary hardware installations. Prohibitive hardware and associated costs are eliminated. Replify’s pricing is based on license blocks according to the number of concurrent users in the system, rather than actual number of users. This gives Replify’s virtualized software approach the industry’s best price/performance and ROI, a key factor in today’s tough economic climate. A software solution allows simple management, installation in minutes, and software based High Availability (HA) using existing infrastructure.
According to Mark Baxter, IT Manager at Mivan:
With Replify, we have seen dramatic performance improvements which were critical to the early adoption of our centralized SharePoint server. Consistently achieving 14 times performance improvement is simply incredible.
It was also refreshing to find a product that ‘just works’ and required no configuration. With Replify you can ‘pay as you grow’, making it very accessible and easily justifiable, especially in the current financial climate.
The users would not have accepted SharePoint without Replify.
The Result
Having previously tried competing solutions, Mivan’s remote staff had not experienced any notable improvement in performance. Following the Replify installation, staff immediately noticed significant performance gains. In fact, they are consistently achieving 14 times performance improvement, with some users achieving up to 20 times.
Replify also provides compelling reporting and network visibility, The Replify Enterprise Manager makes it simple to manage a large Replify Accelerator deployment with many clients and appliances. Network administrators gain a unique view of optimized network resources through the Replify Enterprise Manager.
Organizations configure their Replify Accelerator deployment using its intuitive web interface to automatically provision clients and appliances with the necessary rules to ensure optimal WAN performance. Client groups can also be defined in the Replify Enterprise Manager to control client configuration and generate management reports and graphs with end-to-end network visibility
