Manufacturer speeds network data access

Kingspan Environmental, a manufacturer of environmental containment and control products, has gone live with Wide Area File Services (WAFS) as part of a successful project to consolidate its IT infrastructure.

With over 35 remote locations across Europe, the environmental manufacturing division of Kingspan Group embarked upon a server consolidation strategy to simplify its IT infrastructure and reduce costs four years ago.

Deploying a primarily Citrix-based wide area network (WAN), the company found it needed extra investment to ensure fast and secure access to data centrally located in its three consolidated data centres.

Richard Gray, Kingspan Environmental IT manager told IT PRO how the company's increasingly distributed WAN needed extra management to maximise the use of bandwidth that was limited by legacy line infrastructure.

"Some of the sites we wanted to roll our WAN out to didn't have the required capacity of line," he said. "So we initially looked to deploy bandwidth compression technology to control throughput on those lines."

Kingspan deployed WAN optimisation and management technologies from Expand Networks across the organisation, allowing the company to maximise its bandwidth and improve WAN throughput.

"In addition, the QoS [Quality of Service] technology prioritised the server-based applications, protecting our business critical Citrix applications from congestion, whilst the acceleration techniques overcame any latency," added Gray.

He said some users, like finance staff, needed access to large amounts of data locally in Microsoft Excel format, for example, which meant they could not always work in a purely Citrix environment.

"Increasingly large amounts of data were being pushed across remote sites using large email attachments as the vehicle," he said. "The increased traffic was causing WAN links to break down, decreasing productivity and exacerbating user frustration across the distributed offices."

Kingspan most recently added the WAFS capability of Expand's Compass platform. Switching on this additional network file functionality has allowed it to manage any large spikes in bandwidth demand, according to Gray.

He said, now the company operates in a stable environment with improved remote office user productivity, it will update its WAN environment and continue its consolidation programme, further reducing its data centres down to one.

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