Kingspan Builds its New Dublin Datacenter With Shunra

PHILADELPHIA, February 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

- Fast-Growing Construction Leader Validates Application Performance Before Deploying

Shunra, the industry-recognized authority in Application Performance Engineering (APE) solutions for WAN, Web, Mobile, and Cloud-based networks, announced today that Cavan, Ireland-based Kingspan Group, PLC, a leader in energy-conserving building products and green construction solutions, has deployed Shunra's technology to validate a major server migration from the UK to Ireland before carrying it out. Kingspan's IT management required a "throttle" test to prove that moving their SAP servers into a new Dublin datacenter would not harm performance, and chose Shunra to emulate a wide area network (WAN) for performance testing.

"Shunra's people and products essentially made my choice of Shunra over a competitor's product a no-brainer," said Peter Donnelly, systems engineer for Kingspan IT services. "My research showed Shunra to be the most accurate and trusted real prediction tool on the market, and it confirmed itself with two major proofs immediately. So the Shunra product had already paid for itself before we even got to the primary project, which was to predict the effects of the datacenter migration. Shunra has performed flawlessly there as well. I could not have made a better choice."

Kingspan is targeting world leadership in green building solutions and is facing the challenges of controlling costs amidst rapid growth. Shunra is critical to multiple Kingspan business initiatives moving forward, including:

    
    - "Project Obama", a 36-month effort to reduce IT costs and
      complexity globally by consolidating 50 worldwide computer centers into
      two large datacenters;
    - Centralized Citrix and SAP for the company's worldwide user base;
    - Video conferencing, which will be used to reduce global travel
      costs by 55 percent in 2011; and
    - A new VoIP global telephony system.

"We will be using Shunra's technology to conduct pre-deployment performance testing for all these initiatives - for example, we'll be assessing Polycom and Tandberg video conferencing applications, and Shunra will help us make the decision," said Donnelly. "Kingspan has made it a point to bring in the world's best technology, and we're counting on Shunra to make that technology sing."

"As an explosively growing company on the cutting edge of a compelling market, Kingspan is the quintessential Shunra customer - fast-moving, forward-looking, unwilling to settle for less than the best technology and the best performance possible," said Shunra COO Bill Varga. "Shunra's application performance engineering solutions don't just enable Kingspan's business vision - they actually drive it. We're pleased that Shunra can deliver confidence in application performance as Kingspan moves to its new Dublin datacenter."

About Shunra

Shunra is the industry-recognized leader in Application Performance Engineering (APE) and a pioneer in WAN Emulation. Shunra's customers include 75 of the Fortune 100 with some of the most complex and sophisticated networks in the world. Shunra's APE solutions discover, predict, emulate and analyze the performance of applications over WAN, Web, Mobile and Cloud networks prior to deployment. Shunra delivers dramatic cost savings through customized performance insight, enabling pre-deployment remediation and optimization. Customers include Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Best Buy, Boeing, Cisco Systems, Citibank, eBay, FedEx, GE, IBM, ING Direct, Intel, Marriott, MasterCard, McDonalds, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Oracle, Pepsi, Pfizer, Siemens, Target, Thomson Reuters, TJX, Verizon, Walt Disney and the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. Shunra is headquartered in Philadelphia and privately held. For more information, call 1.877.474.8672 or visit http://www.shunra.com.