Engineering firm saves $1 M annually with network efficiency appliance

Source: Computerworld

With 850 employees working out of 20 offices scattered across five Western states plus Mexico, Psomas is a large civil engineering firm founded in 1946 and named for its founder, George Psomas. It focuses on projects that cover the spectrum of civil engineering, from water/wastewater infrastructure to highway designs to land development engineering. Since 2005 it has saved more than $1 million a year in network costs by implementing the Steelhead network technology to improve the efficiency of its WAN transfers of large CAD files between offices.

As Psomas has grown over the years, it has sufferred increasingly from the simple-seeming problem of getting the right talents on the right projects. Psomas has always believed in work sharing among offices, partly to balance workloads and partly to match the people with the right skills to the right projects. The "home office" for a project usually is the office closest in physical distance from it, but some of the people with special skills that a project requires may live and work hundreds of miles away, in another state or across the U.S./Mexican boundary.

What Psomas found itself doing was transferring large CAD files over the network between offices overnight. These files are huge, and often one CAD file references several others, creating major network loads. This brute force, manual approach also created problems with version management, sometimes resulting in the overwriting of files, requiring engineers to redo work.

"We knew we had a problem," says Chris Pinckney, Psomas's CIO. "But we didn't know there was such a great solution out there until we ran across Riverbed at a conference." They had looked at other potential solutions, but none of them fit the company's needs or fit with its working methods.



Riverbed provides an enterprise-class, appliance-based solution for accelerating the transfer of large files over corporate and public WANs by several times -- on its Web site the company claims up to 100X acceleration increases. The technology is based on Riverhead's Steelhead appliances and Steelhead mobile software. After evaluating the technology, Psomas finished its roll-out of 15 Steelhead appliances to its larger offices in January 2005. It uses the mobile software version for remote employees and within its smaller offices, which do not have the volulme of file transfers to justify an appliance. Since that rollout, the technology has had a definite positive impact, basically solving Psomas' CAD file transfer problem even as its business, and the volume of workshare projects, has grown.

In its initial purchase proposal to senior management, Psomas IT justified the cost on the basis of increased productivity due to increased workshare and decreased need to redo work lost in accidental file over-writes. "And we have seen that," Pinckney says. "But we ended up cost justifying it on bandwidth." These savings come directly from avoiding line upgrades. Monthly data traffic reports typically show a 3X reduction between the files going through the internal LAN and the traffic across the WAN on the other side of the Steelhead appliance. This has allowed it to save a net of more than $1 million a year in direct network costs.

For instance, in October 2007 Psomas saw 2.4 Tbytes of data on its LANs optimized down to 823 GB of WAN traffic by the Steelhead technology, This is an operational figure, not an optimized test, making it all the more impressive. The reductions are so dramatic that they raised questions. However, Pickney says, at the most recent Riverbed users conference, the CIO of another large organization reported that they did independent measurements on both sides of their Steelhead appliances and found the reporting accurate.

This increase in WAN efficiency has allowed subsidiary savings. For instance, Psomas has been able to reduce from seven Exchange servers to three and to centralize most of its mission-critical IT operations in its Irvine, Calif., collocation facility. That facility has required increased trunk lines, but that has been more than made up for by the efficiencies of centralization and reduction in trunk line demands at its other offices.

This approach to ROI, however, is one reason its smallest offices, typically 10-15 employees each, do not have Steelhead appliances. They are not always engaged in workshare projects and so do not have the volume of CAD file transfers that the larger offices generate.

"That is where the Steelhead mobile product comes into our picture," Pinckney says. "It does the same magic the appliances do" and is sufficient for offices where only a few engineers would be collaboratingwith projects in the larger locations at a given time.

Riverbed's capabilities have long-range implications for Psomas as well. "We are seeing a real drop-off in the number of new civil engineers graduating in the United States," Pinckney says. For instance, one of the major California engineering colleges only graduated 50 civil engineers last year. "I have heard experts say that in the future we will be depending more on civil engineers from Asia." At the same time, the demand for civil engineers has increased. They are the master builders of everything from skyscrapers and bridges to water treatment and groundwater facilities. Therefore, an engineering firm like Psomas needs to get maximum efficient use from the engineers it can recruit, and part of that is using the network cloud to connect experts, wherever they may be located, with projects often in geographies far from the location of some of those experts.

Overall, Pinckney says, "When Psomas found Riverbed, it was a hallelujah moment."