The Renewable Energy Systems (RES) Group is based in the UK and develops, builds and maintains wind farms in one of the world’s fastest growing energy sectors. RES has already built over 1,300 megawatts of wind energy capacity and several gigawatts are in development across the UK, Europe and North America. RES is a market leader across these areas.

“The technical consultant’s in-depth knowledge of infrastructure technologies was impressive in helping us to make the right choice. We now have a baseline network that will improve staff productivity and enable us to manage growth, all for a fraction of the expected cost.”  Dr Mike Anderson, RES Technology Director

 

Business Challenges

As its renewable energy business increased, RES recognised that its network capabilities needed to grow in line with productivity and be able to meet future requirements by improving application performance over a high-latency network.

The company’s existing WAN was based on an IPSec VPN over the Internet, connecting offices in the US, UK, Ireland, France, Scandinavia and Australia. While this was a cost-effective solution it was also unpredictable and prone to the communications time-lag delays that characterise high-latency networks.

The business had ambitious plans to deploy centralised applications, migrate applications to web-based clients and to move functions such as staff finance matters onto the network for faster and more secure electronic resolution.

Solution

RES engaged Atos Origin to recommend and deploy an optimised network infrastructure. We conducted a comprehensive review of the existing network as well as future needs, identified the right solution, performed a vendor selection exercise followed by a proof of concept and deployed the desired solution. A WAN acceleration solution. This appliance-based solution for each end of the WAN link uses a variety of techniques such as caching, proxying and spoofing to tackle intricate issues and the added latency of web applications. The WAN acceleration solution is easy to manage and works in line, rather than via an intermediate communications device.

Benefits

• As a result of the implementation RES achieved LAN-like performance over its WAN, gaining an impressive 9-fold performance improvement and an 88% reduction in bandwidth utilisation.
  

Key business benefits include:

• A new ECM solution and financial application were deployed enabling collaborative working with enhanced security
• All IT applications have been improved (exchange, file sharing, video conferencing etc.)
• Inbuilt flexibility for further enhancements, including more server centralisation, an effective use of satellite links for accessing remote wind farms and the possibility to relocate all servers to a hosting data centre environment.

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