Tru Blu Beverages drinks to improved networking

WAN optimization reduces 800 gigabytes of data pushed through network down to 100GB

Inside the Tru Blu Beverages plant. Photo supplied.

Inside the Tru Blu Beverages plant. Photo supplied.

Australian soft drink manufacturer Tru Blu Beverages has reduced its networking traffic through the use of wide area network (WAN) optimization, leading to a 91 per cent data transfer improvement.

The daily average of 800 gigabytes sent through the company’s network has been reduced down to 100GB through the use of Silver Peak optimization software.

Tru Blu Beverages national IT manager Joe Esposito told Computerworld Australia that this has improved the way the company does business and allowed it to maximise network investment.

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Formally known as P&N Beverages, the company was sold to Japanese drinks giant Asahi in 2010. It produces soft drinks such as LA Ice Cola and Wicked Energy.

The company had used previously Blue Coat MACH5 WAN optimization but Esposito decided to have a look at what else was on the market.

“Silver Peak was introduced to us by IT consultancy Networx and it was ranked by Gartner as one of the more leading technologies for WAN optimization,” he said.

The company began working with Silver Peak in September 2011.

Tru Blu Beverages runs a virtual private LAN service (VPLS) network between five Australian offices and a Sydney-based co-location data centre.

The company is getting speeds of 4 megabits per second (Mbps) on a link between offices in Western Australia, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. In addition, an 8Mps link runs to the Sydney head office while a 25Mpbs link connects the data centre.

These connections carry data from email services, Internet and business applications.

The company uses a combination of Silver Peak virtual appliances running on VMware at the data centre and Sydney head office. Physical appliances are present at each branch office.

Silver Peak also helped the company’s migration to VoIP. The company now has 160 VoIP handsets in use.

“We get very few drop-outs or quality issues, and the technology does a good job monitoring our network,” Esposito said.

He added that the company is now looking at deploying videoconferencing technology to reduce travel costs.

“We are not even using half of our bandwidth so we can push through more traffic and this will allow us to do video,” Esposito said.

“We’re looking at Microsoft Lync or Polycom and just testing products at this stage.”

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU, or take part in the Computerworld conversation on LinkedIn: Computerworld Australia

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Tags networking hardwarewan optimisationSilver PeakTru Blu Beverages

More about Blue Coat SystemsGartnerLANMicrosoftNetwork TenPolycomSilver PeakTruVMware Australia

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