What's more, WAFS and WAN optimization appears to be catching on among firms with workers collaborating on documents from multiple sites.
Ron Maxwell, IT manager of Reno, Nevada, architectural firm Blakely
Johnson & Ghusn, is beta testing the Riverbed Steelhead appliance
for home office use. The firm has larger Steelhead appliances in its Reno
and Las Vegas offices.
"We have several people working from home, or who would like to work from home,"
Maxwell says. "Now they work at home in a limited capacity, but we have to do
workarounds. They have to copy files to a USB drive, put them locally on a
laptop, and bring them home. That creates problems. If somebody else works
on that file while it's gone, they override the data."
Another user is also enjoying the advantages of new remote site wares. Alliance Engineering
IT manager Eddie Greene says Availl WAFS software has already made
file sharing much easier for his Richmond, Va., firm's engineers
assigned to remote offices in Baltimore, Md., and Tidewater, Va. Because
several of the firm's engineers work on the same files at the same time,
Greene used to store them centrally on a server in the Richmond office. For
years, the companies sent tapes and disks overnight to engineers working outside
the office. More recently, Alliance used a VPN to download files off the Richmond server.
Greene wasn't too happy with either scenario. "Before Availl, I set a VPN up and mapped remote users to a server in
Richmond, and they would download from my server to their hard drive," he
says. "That was very painful. They would get the file to their hard drive,
delete if off the server so nobody else could get the file while they were
working on it, do their work, then upload it back to the server. If they
messed up the file while it was on their PC, we had to go back to the
previous night's backup."
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
