Cancer Society Selects Riverbed

SAN FRANCISCO -- Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that the Canadian Cancer Society, Ontario Division, has selected and successfully deployed Riverbed's Steelhead WDS appliances. The deployment enabled the Society to consolidate its IT resources for data protection, while also benefiting from substantial data transfer acceleration.

The Society is a national community-based organization of volunteers whose mission is to eradicate cancer and to enhance the quality of life of people living with cancer. It is the largest charitable funder of cancer research in Canada. Last year, the Society contributed close to $47 million to fund a broad spectrum of cancer research – including basic laboratory, behavioral, palliative care and prevention research and research that will directly impact clinical practices and treatment. It has two national offices (in Toronto and Ottawa), 10 provincial and territorial divisions, and more than 600 community locations. Currently the Society’s Ontario division has more than 70,000 volunteers who work along with about 470 dedicated staff members across the province.

The search for a solution began when staff at the Society’s Ontario division realized they needed to replace some old legacy servers. Gerry Holmes, the division’s director of information technology, reviewed several options including a costly network and server upgrade. After doing some research, Holmes determined that even with the upgrade option the Society would not receive the same performance increases that a Riverbed® WDS implementation would provide. Additionally, if the upgraded network or servers went down, the Society’s remote sites could be out of commission for days before replacement equipment could be shipped to the site and a technician could install it. Despite having over 40 locations throughout Ontario, some of the Society’s remote sites are located up to twenty hours away by car; so this was simply not an option. With Riverbed’s solution, technicians hardly ever need to go to the remote sites. User-friendly deployment enables local employees to install the solution, so all the IT department needs to do is simply send the office a box.

Holmes was especially impressed by Gartner’s positioning of Riverbed in the 'WAN Optimization Controller Magic Quadrant.'1 “Riverbed’s placement in that particular report definitely came into play when we decided to research various WDS solutions,” said Holmes. The Society ultimately selected Riverbed's Steelhead appliances because Riverbed was easier to deploy than other solutions and did not require additional changes to its routers. The Society also liked the fact that Riverbed’s solution worked seamlessly without any alterations to its existing network.

“By implementing Riverbed’s solution, we were able to consolidate file servers from our more remote sites, which reduced the maintenance load for our IT department and also enabled us to provide better data protection for our staff,” said Holmes. “Riverbed’s products also gave our end users LAN-like application performance across the wide area network (WAN), which ensured end user satisfaction and collaboration across all of our locations.”Riverbed Technology Inc.