Case Study: Leading Manufacturing Service Provider achieves 1.4–2 Gbps replication and 4:1 WAN data reduction for disaster recovery with Riverbed SteelHead 7050-L

Riverbed® Steelhead® 7050 Appliances Solve Replication Challenges for Leading IT Vendor

A global IT vendor with operations in more than 100 offices faced mounting difficulty meeting disaster-recovery SLAs as growing NetApp SnapMirror replication workloads strained limited WAN bandwidth and suffered from high latency. Under pressure to control costs, the company could not justify expensive WAN upgrades or add processing load to storage arrays, leaving them at risk of missing recovery point objectives for critical data between bi-coastal data centers.

They evaluated WAN optimization products and deployed Riverbed Steelhead 7050‑L appliances, which used SSDs and 10 Gb interfaces to accelerate SnapMirror traffic. The Steelheads delivered an average 1.4 Gbps (up to 2 Gbps peak) throughput, achieved about 4:1 WAN data reduction, avoided costly bandwidth upgrades, and provided a scalable, easier-to-manage solution that restored their DR capability and future growth headroom.