Reinsurance broker Benfield has rolled out Wan
acceleration technology to assign bandwidth intelligently to key
applications across its principal global offices.
The firm said growing pressure on the network had driven the
adoption of the system. More than 1,500 users operate over 100
data-intensive research and financial applications and analysis
software models.
Ian Dobbyn, Benfield’s network services manager, said the risk
of disruption and downtime in an environment where staff required
fast, accurate and accessible applications to act on global market
information had made more intelligent networking an imperative.
The technology, from Silver Peaks, uses local-instance
networking to inspect and classify all Wan traffic. This means that
when a file is transferred at the beginning of the day a local copy
is cached for quick access by users, relieving pressure on the
network.
Steve Broadhead, director of Broadband-Testing Labs, said Wan
acceleration is likely to become increasingly common, as it is very
cost effective compared with the next most viable alternative –
deploying a enterprise application globally.
“Different suppliers go about it in different ways, but
typically [Wan acceleration] results in a two to 10 times
improvement in performance, and sometimes considerably greater,”
said Broadhead.
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