Redcats Asia Taps Riverbed Steelhead Appliances for Cloud Management Solution

By Anshu Shrivastava, TMCnet Contributor

Redcats Asia, a division of Redcats, has deployed 13 Riverbed Steelhead appliances in its branch offices in Asia in support of its private cloud initiative.

The company’s employees were frustrated with lengthy delays in accessing documents and applications over the WAN, and decreased productivity was a real issue, said Sam Chui, senior regional manager of IT and Logistics at Redcats Asia.

“After a careful evaluation of WAN optimization offerings, Riverbed (News - Alert) became the clear choice, Chui said, adding that the cloud management solution was the easiest to configure and the performance increase was near instantaneous.

Redcats federates 17 brands and in 30 different countries, it employs more than 18,000 people. It uses a multi-channel approach – combining catalogues, Internet and specialty stores with over 27 million active customers worldwide.

From its remote offices, Redcats Asia started receiving negative feedback after it consolidated its IT resources into a private cloud at its headquarters in Hong Kong. The remote offices complained about slow response times for applications being accessed over the wide area network (WAN), according to company officials.

Initially, the company’s IT department upgraded the WAN bandwidth to resolve the issue of poor application performance. Moreover, they also considered satellite for its remote sites. However, both the approaches did not solve the performance problems, said company officials.

The company thoroughly evaluated a number of WAN optimization products, including from Blue Coat (News - Alert), Cisco, Juniper Networks and Riverbed. Company officials said that they selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances due to impressive performance gains and ease-of-installation.

Thanks to Riverbed deployment, Redcats has seen an immediate and drastic decrease in application response times for business critical applications. “After deploying Riverbed, we recognized a significant decrease in application response times -- our employees were delighted,” Chui said.

After seeing the positive results, the company decided to deploy the Steelhead appliances in all the offices in Asia where it is experiencing major performance issues, Chui said.

 “Moving forward, Riverbed is our corporate standard for any new office deployment, and will be the first and sometimes only IT device deployed in any new office,” Chui said.

Recently, Akamai (News - Alert) Technologies and Riverbed Technology introduced the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, a jointly developed solution that combines Akamai's Internet optimization technology and Riverbed wide area network (WAN) optimization technology to deliver optimization for software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) applications.