Rayonier: Riverbed's happiest customer?

David Spark reporting for Riverbed at Interop '09, Las Vegas, NV.

Throughout the show I've been hearing testimonials from Riverbed customers, and Adam Rasner of Rayonier must be one of the biggest Riverbed fans I've met. Rasner is the director, corporate network services for Rayonier, Inc., a 2,000 person forest products company that creates timber, real estate, performance fibers.

Decentralized on five continents. Rasner said Rayonier wanted to reduce costs by consolidating their eight data centers down to just two. The business was very concerned about application performance as systems and apps were being moved offsite.

Rayonier had 80 nodes on their network, with a variety of topologies: MPLS, Frame Relay, DMVPN, satellite, and traditional site-to-site VPN technologies. Rayonier got rid of the old Frame Relay and consolidated to MPLS, Rasner said.

Not only did they use WAN optimization for consolidation, but Rasner said Rayonier wanted to use their WAN network for replication, disaster recovery, and high availability.

Rayonier looked at four WAN optimization suppliers: Cisco, Riverbed, Blue Coat, and Citrix Netscaler. He rated them on three criteria: application performance over the wire, ease of deployment and integration, and bandwidth reduction. 

Riverbed was the clear winner with 70 to 90% total data bandwidth reduction, depending on the application being used.

Since Rayonier had such success with Riverbed's Steelhead appliances, they decided to deploy Steelhead Mobile to their Cisco VPN users. For sites that had less than five users, they used the mobile connection. Same reduced bandwidth costs, but for employees traveling Rayonier saw huge savings in remote locations where there were high pay-per-minute/megabyte costs. 

Other benefits, said Rasner, were:

• Centralized backup of remote servers.
• Speed up replication of data between facilities for disaster recovery.
• High availability of critical systems and sped up failover processes.
• No need to hire professional services.
• No affect to their VoIP services.

In the end, Rasner said Rayonier saw ROI in just 12 months and alleviated the need to increase bandwidth for years. Watch my follow up interview with Rasner.

For more, check out all of Riverbed's Interop '09 Las Vegas coverage.