Reed Smith Summons Packeteer to Deliver Intelligent WAN Optimization for Data Center Consolidation

Business Wire, March 5, 2007

Leading Law Firm Deploys PacketShapers for Unprecedented Views Into All Network Traffic to Successfully Converge Data, Voice, Video Applications

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Packeteer([R]) (NASDAQ:PKTR), the global leader in WAN Application Optimization, today announced that Reed Smith, one of the 15 largest law firms in the world, is deploying its PacketShapers[TM] to intelligently classify, monitor and adaptively prioritize strategic applications in support of a major data center consolidation initiative. By deploying PacketShapers, Reed Smith can intelligently identify all traffic running across its wide area network, optimize application performance through a deep understanding of its traffic types and loads, and ensure that managed service providers are delivering bandwidth levels stipulated by service level agreements. PacketShapers will also enable the firm to successfully converge its data, voice and future video applications on its existing network without requiring expensive WAN link upgrades.

With more than 1,500 lawyers operating out of 21 offices throughout the United States, Europe and the Middle East, Reed Smith provides litigation services in multi-jurisdictional matters and other high-stake disputes while supporting a full range of strategic domestic and cross-border transactions for its clients.

The firm is currently in the midst of a comprehensive data center consolidation effort that is being driven by three key factors: business continuity, to safeguard large volumes of data and provide uninterrupted service to business critical resources in the event of a catastrophic event such as 9-11 and Katrina; technical agility, to support data/voice/video application rollouts and convergence; and mergers and acquisitions, in support of new office openings and enhanced opportunities for its attorneys to work remotely with LAN-like access to a centralized pool of resources and data. These factors, combined with the time sensitivity and magnitude of cases that frequently involve collaboration between practice area specialists operating from offices world wide, require the firm's resources to be centralized in a primary data center. Anywhere, anytime access is facilitated through the use of thin client services via a large Citrix deployment.

According to Frank Hervert, senior manager of network and messaging services at Reed Smith, the firm generates, transmits and stores an extraordinarily high volume of data, voice and video traffic accessible by all offices and supported by redundant connections to a global primary MPLS and secondary private Ethernet wide area network. Eighty-seven terabytes of storage is currently appropriated at the firm's primary data center. Three terabytes is consumed by Microsoft Exchange-based email alone. It is common practice to transfer and store upwards of 100 gigabytes of digitized data used for depositions daily, all of which place significant demands on Reed Smith's WAN.

"At the outset of this consolidation effort, our primary goal was to prioritize voice and Citrix traffic as distinct classes of service, with everything else treated on a best effort basis," Hervert said. "What we didn't anticipate during the initial migration to our centralized model is that there is much more than just basic administrative traffic like SNMP and Active Directory populating our links. This prompted us to investigate our traffic flows much more vigorously since the optimal performance of our high-priority traffic provides a distinct competitive advantage and ensures our workforce operates as efficiently and productively as possible."

Gaining Insight With Packeteer

Having previously used Packeteer solutions to troubleshoot its network, Reed Smith opted to deploy the top-of-the-line PacketShaper 10K systems in its data center core connecting to the primary MPLS and secondary private Ethernet network. In addition to the need for better visibility into its traffic flows, Reed Smith required a solution that immediately responded to changes in traffic conditions to preserve Citrix and voice traffic priority.

"By operating out of the centralized data center, the PacketShapers have a unique vantage point to discover and react to traffic we didn't realize was running over our network," says Karl Greenwood, network analyst with Reed Smith. "Also, because our Internet access is centralized out of the data center, the PacketShapers can help us spot 'less critical' and recreational traffic that can encroach on business critical applications. So we leverage the systems to enforce adaptive policies that 'de-prioritizes' this traffic in the event the network experiences a temporary lull in performance."

The intelligent visibility provided by PacketShapers also helped Reed Smith discover its high availability primary MPLS and secondary networks are functioning as originally designed. "Our primary network supports Citrix, voice and other critical data while our secondary network handles Internet, printing, and FTP loads to our data center. For business continuity purposes, should our primary MPLS network fail, all traffic is routed through our secondary private Ethernet network back to the data center and vice versa. With the help of the PacketShapers, we were able to validate our designs and track our application traffic flows. In a primary or secondary network failure we simply utilize our PacketShapers to adaptively prioritize and protect Citrix and voice traffic when they converge onto a single network sharing the Internet or print traffic. Reed Smith is also leveraging PacketShaper's Report Center to better quantify the impact of traffic by analyzing network usage down to the level of specific hosts. This will ensure we don't overprovision bandwidth to various branch offices, especially those with over 100 employees, which could save us from investing in significant recurring costs."