August Storytellers Contest Winner

As we acknowledged a couple of weeks ago, we fell woefully behind in recognizing our monthly Storytellers Contest Winners, and we promised that we'd fix it.  Here is the next one. 

The winner of the August Storytellers contest is Greg Moore, the IT Director for SRG Partnership, an architectural firm based in Portland, OR that focuses on sustainable strategies.  Greg describes his job as running the gamut from Network Administrator to Help Desk Tech to Business Strategist, which includes setting strategy for SRG's technology initiatives.

SRG only has three Steelhead appliances, located in their three offices (Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco), but they are tremendously valuable to the organization.  They use them to accelerate very slow bandwidth between our sites, enabling file server access, web-based Digital Asset Management, Deltek Vision ERP, multi-site Exchange 2010, Remote Desktop, DFS sync, AutoCAD, Revit and Indesign.

The result is that they are able to collaborate between offices using a variety of digital content development tools that otherwise require LAN performance. As Greg says, "The Steelheads enable us to avoid deploying expensive Exchange infrastructure in our SFO location where we have just a handful of users, all of whom are creative workers exchanging very large emails. We have been able to keep our costs down on expensive bandwidth since all of our offices are in facilities with no planned fiber access due to building age and lightrail adjacency."

They only have 3MB connections between their offices, but they push an "an easy 10GB" of data across the links just about every day.

You can read the whole award-winning story in our Community at No bandwidth here? No problem!

And while you're there, you can look at other stories, vote on the ones that you like best, and maybe even enter your own story. Who knows?  You could win next month!