CASE STUDY: Teneo & Devon and Cornwall Police

Advice 2010-08-23 11:20

Teneo reduces data traffic by 70 percent through a Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimisation solution installed at twenty-six small or rural Devon and Cornwall constabulary police stations

With these 70 rural and smaller locations, the constabulary worked with its team of IT liaison officers across the constabulary to gauge where the appliances can best be deployed. Teneo has also worked with the constabulary and its IT service contractor Sungard to use the Riverbed appliances to centralise data back-up, which was previously reliant on on-site tape drives. The appliances also enhance data security as they only send through the data changes, with any data sent being automatically encrypted and compressed.

Jim Goodwin, network manager, Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, comments: “There are two competing issues for providing a good IT network experience to these more remote locations. On the one hand, trying to give them the best performance that we can, and on the other, making it as cost effective as we can because we can’t afford to install fibre links at all these locations. Our Riverbed Steelhead trial went exactly to plan - it reduced the traffic on our link from Torquay and made performance better. It actually delivered an impressive 70 percent data reduction.

“Teneo has been really good, they are very pro-active and have offered any support we have wanted. The Riverbed solution offers so many other benefits. Our Riverbed Steelheads can now be re-deployed for a major incident to cope with unpredictable jumps in bandwidth usage. If we have 20 to 30 officers at a major incident unit, we can use an appliance as an instant fix to help get around any bandwidth constraints.”

James Hall, marketing director, Teneo, comments: “Organisations with a network of locations such as Devon and Cornwall Constabulary face issues of trying to deliver a uniform level of network performance because of the variability of the network connections available. Although installing new networks was cost prohibitive, the constabulary wanted to help its employees working in these smaller, rural stations, and achieving 70% data reduction using Riverbed has greatly improved the network performance for the end users.

“With our Riverbed Steelhead solution, the constabulary is now also driving efficiencies such as centralised data back-up and server consolidation, and is using Riverbed Master Control to analyse the data traffic effectively.”