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NETWORK PERFORMANCE
From the February 2007 |
Improve performance–24/7 With restaurants dispersed across a wide geographic area, data communications is sometimes challenging for the The Steak ‘n Shake Company, especially through the very small aperture terminal (VSAT) satellite system used by the company. One of the oldest restaurant chains in the United States, Steak ‘n Shake had recently upgraded the performance of its satellite network to enable faster uploads and downloads to the restaurants, but users were still experiencing slow response times. Even with the use of the native compression capability provided by the satellite service, key internal applications such as PeopleSoft, Lotus iNotes and Cognos, as well as Aloha Reporting and Radiant (all of which are primarily HTML browser-based applications), were affected. So the challenge for the operator of more than 478 restaurants in 19 states was how to improve browser response times for end-users of these business applications. The company began investigating acceleration solutions, including back-end devices and additional network upgrades. The firm eventually came upon Stampede Technologies and its Application Acceleration Series product (previously known as WebRider). The solution is a two-sided hardware/software acceleration solution for improving the performance of WAN-based applications, especially those over satellite, while reducing the bandwidth utilization of those same applications. Stampede’s solution is implemented with a hardware appliance at the data center, and client software on the remote user devices (PCs) at the restaurants, providing bidirectional acceleration from the application to the users, and from the users to the application. Steak ‘n Shake worked with Stampede on a multiphase evaluation process prior to the purchase. The first step was to contact several of Stampede’s existing customers using satellite communications. The positive feedback from these customers led Steak ‘n Shake to do a proof of concept (POC) with Stampede. The POC identified the selected applications that were to be tested, and the objective of the tests (minimum 30 percent response time improvements). Stampede provided a fully configured and functionally tested system prior to installation. Initial testing showed good results in terms of compression and caching, resulting in improved performance. Some challenges were identified with WebSense, a Web-filtering solution used by Steak ‘n Shake to filter and enforce Internet usage. Stampede was able to make some configuration changes to the appliance to ensure that the Web-filtering solution had access to all the necessary information it was expecting. During the testing, Steak ‘n Shake began to realize improved response times and reduced bandwidth utilization. According to Josh Greenlee, director of restaurant systems at Steak ‘n Shake, “Not only did we achieve great results in accelerating our application, we also are saving a huge amount of bandwidth, which will extend the life of our investment in our store network. “We were able to meet and, in many cases, exceed our goal of a minimum 30 percent reduction in response times to the end-users,” he adds. Initial access times for the Aloha Reporting application reduced from one minute and 11 seconds to 15 seconds–a 79 percent improvement. Web portal access times were reduced by 72 percent, bandwidth utilization by 63 percent, and page hits on the Web servers were reduced by 45 percent.
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