Case Study: Canadian Cancer Society achieves private-cloud consolidation and faster application performance with Riverbed

Riverbeds End-to-End IT Performance Solutions Save Money that Goes Toward Cancer Research

The Canadian Cancer Society is a national nonprofit and the largest charitable funder of cancer research in Canada, with hundreds of offices, 1,200 staff and 170,000 volunteers. Its Ontario division wanted to consolidate 35 remote servers into a private cloud to simplify backups and cut upgrade costs, but poor WAN performance left users waiting for files and blocked the move; any fix also had to be simple enough for nontechnical remote staff to install.

A pilot deployment of Riverbed SteelHead appliances (about 40 units) plus SteelCentral (Cascade) monitoring delivered plug‑and‑play WAN optimization and end-to-end visibility. The result: 35 servers were consolidated into seven VMware hosts running 98 virtual servers, email and web apps now respond instantly, VoIP was enabled without bandwidth upgrades, disaster recovery was simplified, and IT can isolate problems in minutes—allowing the team to handle a larger workload without adding staff.

Canadian Cancer Society

Gerald Holmes

IT director