Watch data run faster from the U.S. to Indonesia than in your data center

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

Is it possible that data traveling from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Jakarta, Indonesia could be faster than data traveling within a data center in Philadelphia? Such was the unbelievable discovery by Karl Ciemniecki and Nick Fiekowsky of the pharmaceutical company Wyeth when they deployed Riverbed WAN optimization.

It's all because the amount of traffic being transmitted between Riverbed's WAN accelerators is only a fraction of what they're actually sending. In one example, a 1.4 MB file being sent from their data center in Phliadelphia was crunched to only 497K of traffic once it began traveling between WAN accelerators. Once in Jakarta, that file expanded back to the 1.4 MB file, explained Wyeth's Ciemniecki.

Wyeth has been working with WAN optimization since 2005. The issues that were driving the business decision for WAN optimization have been cost reduction, lower bits, fewer data centers, fewer servers in remote sites, and less applications instances.

In their tests, Wyeth copied applications, files, and replicated desktop images. They saw 27% to 47% improvement in traffic between Philadelphia and Japan. But with specific files, they would see file reductions as high as 97% (in one case for a 2 MB PowerPoint file).

The greatest test was to create a centralized Microsoft farm, allowing people to access and run SharePoint over the WAN from a central location. Doing so allowed for better collaboration and much easier support, thanks to centralized configuration.

In the end, Wyeth said that with Riverbed, they've deployed fewer remote site boxes and have had easier and lower cost support. Together, that all translates to a lot fewer problems.

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