Case Study: Mercury Marine achieves 75% shorter backup windows with Riverbed SteelHead appliances

Riverbed Steelhead Appliances Reduce Backup Windows by 75%

Mercury Interactive, a global leader in business technology optimization serving most Fortune 100 companies, faced a critical data-protection challenge: backing up distributed development sites over MPLS links with limited throughput and high latency. Network-based backups using NetApp SnapMirror could take up to 24 hours, risking loss of recent code builds and consuming significant IT time for monitoring.

Mercury deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at four offices to accelerate WAN traffic and SnapMirror replication; backups dropped from about 24 hours to roughly 6–8 hours (a ~75% reduction), allowing overnight jobs to finish reliably and reducing manual oversight. The appliances also cut bandwidth use by ~90%, shortened the development cycle (FTP transfers reduced cycle time from 4 days to 1.5 days), and let IT focus on strategic projects.

Mercury Marine

Pete Kinkead

Director of IT