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Cisco defeats Riverbed in WAN-op refresh project

"We have a high level of confidence that anything we buy from Cisco will work."

Wed, 8/8/12 - 5:55am    View comments

5-years ago, Raleigh, North Carolina based civil engineering consultancy, Mulkey, bought a WAN optimization solution from Riverbed Technology.

This week, Cisco is claiming that it won the Mulkey WAN optimization "refresh project."

Cisco won even though over the past 5-years, Mulkey became totally dependent on the Riverbed WAN optimization solution:

"Once you have it in a high-volume worksharing environment like ours, 'WAN-op' quickly becomes a necessity. That was confirmed every time we turned off one of the appliances for maintenance. We would start hearing complaints about the 'slow' network within minutes," said Mulkey network engineer, Aaron Denny.

So why did Mulkey award its new WAN optimization "refresh project" to Cisco instead of the incumbent vendor Riverbed?

Well according to Barry Pierce, the IT Manager of Mulkey:

"The Riverbed appliances had worked well for us, but we had a broad set of requirements and considerations, from capabilities to costs. Our old Riverbed appliances were 'plug-and-play'. We didn't want to spend thousands of dollars on something new and need someone to come in and help us get it up and running.

"We're familiar with Cisco performance, reliability, and support, so we have a high level of confidence that anything we buy from Cisco will work. We prepared and configured the devices here at our main IT location, then shipped them to the branches, we were finished in a few days. We're saving money, not necessarily instantly, but over time, with centralized management, we save on resources every time we execute system upgrades and patches. All our users are happier, because they can download and open files in seconds. To get the same level of centralized management capabilities in Riverbed's newest solution would have required an additional 'optional' purchase."

Pierce concluded:

"Looking to the future, we're sure our Cisco virtualized WAN optimization solution will scale with our requirements, our growth, and our shift toward more and more private cloud services."

Here are the products Cisco sold into the Mulkey refresh project:

• Cisco 274, 574, and 674 Wide Area Virtualization Engines (WAVEs)
• Cisco WAAS virtual Central Manager (vCM)
• Cisco UCS C210 Server Value Bundle
• Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) C210 M2 Server
• Cisco Catalyst 3560-X switch with 24 ports

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