Case Study: Career Education Corporation achieves server centralization and improved WAN performance with Riverbed SteelHead WAN optimization

WAN optimization enables server centralization, ensuring student and faculty satisfaction with the company’s network

Career Education Corporation (CEC) is a global provider of career-focused education with more than 90 campuses, ~100,000 students and ~14,000 employees. Facing a plan to centralize critical systems (email, backups and voice) into two data centers, IT worried that increased WAN traffic and latency would degrade application performance and student/faculty experience—buying more bandwidth was costly and wouldn’t solve latency.

CEC deployed 80 Riverbed SteelHead WAN-optimization appliances in four months to reduce transport inefficiencies and application round trips. The appliances cut WAN traffic by roughly 45–65% (including ~64% for backups and ~40% for email), effectively doubling usable bandwidth without recurring bandwidth costs, restoring application performance, easing patching and backups, reducing troubleshooting, and improving user satisfaction.

Career Education Corporation

Jonathan Cabrera

Lead Network Engineer