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Sealed Air - riverbed.com STUDY Sealed Air Sealed Air Reduces WAN Traffic 63% with Riverbed® Steelhead® Appliances Sealed Air is a leading global manufacturer of materials and systems

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CASE STUDY

Sealed AirSealed Air Reduces WAN Traffic 63% with Riverbed® Steelhead® Appliances

Sealed Air is a leading global manufacturer of materials and systems for protective, presentation, and fresh food packaging solutions in the industrial, food, and consumer markets. Its major brands include Bubble Wrap® brand cushioning, CRYOVAC® fresh food packaging, Instapak® foam packaging, and Jiffy Mailer® products for small parcel shipping. Sealed Air’s products protect and preserve its customers’ products — from the plant or warehouse through the rigors of the global distribution chain.

Challenge Founded in 1960, Sealed Air is a leading global innovator and manufacturer of a wide range of protective packaging and performance-based materials essential to many consumer and industrial markets. Operating in 51 countries, Sealed Air combines a unique consultative sales expertise with a global network of science and innovation.

Over 160 Sealed Air manufacturing, data center, warehousing, and office locations are connected over a private wide area network (WAN), and many of the locations were experiencing poor application

performance. According to Jean-Michel Ricard, Sealed Air’s manager of global network services, “WAN bandwidth costs were getting out of control at a time when users were complaining about slow application response times. We were faced with either provisioning additional bandwidth or decreasing the traffic we carry over our global network.”

Kevin Bradshaw, senior network analyst for Sealed Air, added, “We were having performance issues in remote offices, primarily due to our limited bandwidth capacity. Increasing bandwidth speeds to each location was not a financially viable option, nor would it address our latency issues, so we needed to find a way to support increasing volumes of email and HTTP traffic as well as daily replications and rapidly increasing Lotus Notes traffic.”

Solution Sealed Air compared Riverbed® Steelhead® appliances with other solutions and selected Riverbed as its WAN optimization solutions provider. “Riverbed offered proven technology that would be easy to install worldwide. Riverbed also had tighter hooks into the applications we rely on, and had better support for application-specific optimization,” said Ricard.

After selecting the Riverbed solution, Sealed Air then deployed nearly 130 Steelhead appliances to locations across the globe within about six months.

Riverbed Steelhead appliances provide the highest level of WAN performance across the broadest range of applications. Available in a wide range of sizes – all powered by the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS®) – Steelhead appliances are also the most scalable approach to application acceleration across the WAN. Steelhead appliances come in a range of sizes to ensure that each location has a properly sized acceleration appliance.

Sealed Air IT personnel deployed the Steelhead appliances at the larger locations — such as their headquarters facilities and in data centers — and preconfigured the rest of the appliances and shipped them to remote facilities for deployment primarily by non-technical personnel. “All Steelhead

IN BRIEF

Industry

»» Manufacturing (Packaging solutions in the industrial, food, and consumer markets)

Challenges

»» WAN bandwidth costs were increasing

»» Users were complaining about slow application response times

»» Sealed Air was having performance issues in remote offices due to limited bandwidth capacity

Solution

»» Sealed Air deployed nearly 130 Steelhead appliances to locations across the globe within about six months

Benefits

»» Users worldwide noticed dramatic improvements in application performance immediately

»» The cost, time and labor involved in shipping large graphics file was eliminated, and Sealed Air guaranteed that these files would be transmitted within the hour

»» Sealed Air reduced the volume of data shipped over the WAN by 63%, allowing the company to improve application performance and user satisfaction while avoiding the costs of bandwidth upgrades

Our Products Protect Your Products®

“We are now saving approxi-mately $900,000 per year by

avoiding bandwidth upgrades and doing more for less.”

appliances are deployed in-path of network traffic, and since many of our smaller remote locations are not staffed with IT personnel, we needed an easy-to-install solution that could be deployed without the need for third-party professional services organizations,” said Bradshaw.

The company is also using Steelhead appliances to deliver QoS guarantees to its users. “We created a few classes of traffic and mark them at the edge of the network, which allows us to prioritize mission-critical applications like VoIP and SAP enterprise resource planning applications,” said Ricard. “The Steelhead appliances have allowed us to provide improved performance for our remote sites while keeping within our existing networking budget. We are constantly being pressured to reduce the costs of the network, and the Steelhead appliances allow us to optimize WAN traffic so we can increase productivity worldwide while carefully controlling our expenses.”

Benefits“Users worldwide noticed dramatic improvements in application performance immediately,” explained Ricard. “Microsoft files were noticeably faster. Users were gaining near instantaneous access to files they previously had to wait a day to receive.”

Sealed Air regularly shares very large graphics files across multiple countries, and previously had to ship them overnight to locations worldwide. “The network simply couldn’t handle transmissions of promotional graphics files that typically averaged about 400 MB in size,” said Ricard. “Once we deployed the Steelhead appliances, we were able to eliminate the cost, time, and labor involved in shipping graphics files, and we now give our graphics department a service level agreement (SLA) where we guarantee that these files will be transmitted within an hour. This is a great achievement for us because we were able to leverage WAN optimization and acceleration to change a traditional workflow to improve productivity, reduce costs, and satisfy our users throughout the world.”

The deployment of Riverbed Steelhead appliances has allowed Sealed Air to reduce the volume of data shipped over the WAN by 63%, allowing the company to improve application performance and user satisfaction while avoiding the costs of bandwidth upgrades. “We calculate that we received a full return on investment (ROI) in Steelhead appliances in less than 14 months,” said Ricard. “We are now saving approximately $900,000 per year by avoiding bandwidth upgrades and doing more for less.”

CASE STUDY: Sealed Air

Sealed Air is now running proof-of-concept testing for Steelhead Mobile, and is considering deploying Steelhead Mobile to give mobile workers LAN-like access to corporate files and applications. With a simple software package installed transparently on laptops or desktops, Steelhead Mobile can overcome the challenges of variable locations, inconsistent links, and high-latency environments that all conspire against mobile workers.

SUMMARY

Over 160 Sealed Air manufacturing, data center, warehousing, and office locations are connected over a private WAN, and many of the locations were experiencing poor application performance.

After selecting the Riverbed solution, Sealed Air then deployed nearly 130 Steelhead appliances to locations across the globe within about six months. The deployment of Riverbed Steelhead appliances has allowed Sealed Air to reduce the volume of data shipped over the WAN by 63%, allowing the company to improve application performance and user satisfaction while avoiding the costs of bandwidth upgrades.

2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011

About RiverbedRiverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.

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