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IT Solutions & Systems
IT Solutions
Excitech supplies and supports over 400 organisations with core IT systems. Our experience and expertise is demonstrated by accreditations including Microsoft Gold Partner, HP Preferred Partner, and also Riverbed Partner, Dell, Double-Take, Vmware, SonicWALL, Symantec and McAfee partner status.

Excitech customers see significant benefits from buying their core IT products and support from the same supplier as their design solutions. These benefits include a single helpdesk, a single supplier relationship to manage, and a supplier who fully understands CAD specific IT issues such as CAD workstations, large format printing, using CAD over a wide area network, and the network licensing and deployment of Autodesk products.
IT Solutions

WAN Acceleration & Remote Working

With the explosive growth in recent years first of broadband internet connections, then more recently with 3G mobile broadband, there has been a growing expectation among users and organisations that data should be available everywhere.

Users want access to files and emails from home, hotel rooms, wireless hot-spots, and even on the move. Furthermore businesses increasingly want to support home working and mobile computing.

Fortunately to support these demands, manufacturers such as SonicWALL have created modestly priced Firewall and Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliances. These protect business from Internet borne threats, manage what traffic can and cannot pass over an internet connection, may scan for viruses, may manage web and email content, and support site-to-site and site to mobile user Virtual Private network (VPN) connections.
 
For organisations that need to regularly transfer large volumes of data over Wide Area Networks (WANs) or who want to work interactively over VPN connections at close to Local Area Network (LAN) speeds, even the latest, fastest bandwidth connections, can struggle. For these businesses we recommend Riverbed’s Steelhead family of WAN Acceleration products.
 
IT Enquiry
 

Case Studies

Useful Information
Saunders Partnership
Performance brief for AutoCAD
Gensler
 
Lagan Construction
 
Little Diversified Architects
 
 
 

Riverbed Benchmarking
Riverbed accelerates all WAN traffic but CAD users will want to know how well it works with CAD data.
 
Testing Method

All trials were performed on a live network between two offices, each with a 2Mb leased line internet connection. And where possible, all tests were done with the Riverbed off, cold, warm and a test performed against a local server for comparison.

In this context “cold” means that the Steelheads have never seen the data before so there are no Data Streamlining benefits, but we still see performance improvements as a result of Transport and Application Streamlining. “Warm” means that the Steelheads have seen the data before so we are seeing the full Riverbed benefit.
 
Results
 
9.2MB AutoCAD 2007 DWG Files
 
No Riverbed
Cold
Warm
Local Server
Open
1m 25secs
1m 45 secs
24secs
20secs
Save
1m 25secs
2m 20secs
2m 14secs
18secs
Re-open
1m 20secs
18secs
18secs
18secs
 
2007 DWG with X-refs, same file as above split into three DWG files, each of 5.9MB
 
No Riverbed
Cold
Warm
Local Server
Open
2m 3secs
20secs
19secs
19secs
Save
1m 10secs
1m 45secs
1m 36secs
9secs
Re-open
2m 0secs
20secs
19secs
18secs
 
Revit 2008, 32MB, with Worksets
 
No Riverbed
Warm
Open Central file
1m 52secs
1m 27secs
Save Central File
4m 49secs
1m 51secs
 
Revit 2008, 32MB, with Worksets
 
No Riverbed
Warm
Local Server
Open Central File
4m 04secs
55secs
51secs
Copy Central File to Local
3m 26secs
10secs
7secs
Save to Central
2m 32secs
24secs
17secs
 
15.4MB AVI File
 
No Riverbed
Cold
Warm
Local Server
Open
1m 15secs
35secs
3secs
2secs
 
Conclusion
Riverbed offers the opportunity to significantly improve the performance of both site-to-site and remote user VPN connections. For companies struggling to work productively over slow broadband connections, Riverbed offers a cost-effective and viable alternative to massive increases in WAN bandwidth.

 

 

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