Case Study: Flow International achieves near-real-time disaster recovery and 98–99% WAN efficiency with Riverbed SteelHead WAN optimization

Flow International - Customer Case Study

Flow International Corporation, a global leader in ultrahigh‑pressure waterjet technology with about 600 employees worldwide, relied on a centralized ERP to run its international operations. Replicating terabytes of RecoverPoint and Microsoft DPM data to a distant DR site over a cost‑constrained WAN threatened its disaster‑recovery objectives and the company’s goal of replicating ERP data within 30 minutes.

Flow deployed 13 Riverbed SteelHead appliances at headquarters, the DR center and regional sites to optimize all WAN traffic and complement RecoverPoint’s compression, allowing RecoverPoint to focus on I/O. The result: replication traffic was optimized by more than 95% (total WAN data reduction ~86%), RecoverPoint replication moved from a 30‑minute target to near‑real‑time (about five seconds), RPO/RTO targets are met without adding bandwidth, and effective bandwidth capacity increased roughly 7.94×.

Flow International

Jason Dickens

Enterprise Infrastructure Manager