Application acceleration advantages

Chris Majauckas, computer technology manager for Metrocorp Publications, faced a customer service challenge from a slightly different perspective. He needed to speed up file transfers between offices in two capital cities and reduce colour-printing expenses for the pages of each city's magazine. His customers were the internal art directors who needed to see pages for final approval.

"We spent $US1 million per year on high-end printing to match pages for approval by our art departments to exactly what they'd look like in final press," Majauckas said. "Half of that expense, $500,000, was outsourced to an external vendor."

The process involved transferring a hundred 200Mbyte files between two locations over the course of 100 hours, or more than four days for the complete data transfer, Majauckas said. He said the company even shelled out cash for new printers and an additional T-1 (that all applications were able to tap) in one city so the art directors could get the pages more quickly and see more accurately exactly what would show up in print. He also rolled out a packet sniffer to watch traffic over the VPN to better understand what applications consumed traffic.

"We were looking for the best way to send data more quickly between the two cities," he said. After rejecting several options that Majauckas considered too manually intensive, cost-exorbitant or cumbersome in terms of workflow, he started working with Orbital Data and its application acceleration appliances. Orbital Data delivers rack-mountable appliances loaded with software that address high-speed connections and data transfers over WANs.

By installing an appliance in each office, Majauckas reported that he reduced file transfer time for one page, from more than an hour to about six minutes.

"The pages transfer almost as though we are working on a local LAN," he said. "And other applications between the two offices can take advantage of the compression and acceleration technologies."

In terms of cost savings, Majauckas said he reduced the expense of $500,000 to an outsourcing vendor down to $150,000, saving his company about $350,000 per year. An unexpected benefit, he added, is that the faster processing time gives the magazines' ad sales people another day to fill the book with paid advertisements.

"The justification for the new technology was to save money by bringing this in house, and the added bonus was we get another day to sell the book because we saved time on the process," he said.