Oxfam Boosts Performance With Expand Networks Acceleration

ROSELAND, New Jersey, June 1, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

- Integrated WAN Optimisation Technology Enables Reliable and Stable Connectivity for Charity Staff and Volunteers

Expand Networks http://www.expand.com, the leader in optimising WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualisation, today announced Oxfam Australia, the humanitarian charity, has deployed Expand Networks Accelerators across its international network of offices. The solution is assuring the performance of the charity's network, connectivity and applications in support of staff activity between its Australian and overseas operations. The implementation follows the successful international deployment of Expand's WAN Optimization technology at Oxfam GB.

Oxfam Australia utilises a robust fully managed Wide Area Network (WAN) within its Australian based operations, while its overseas operations covering sites in 11 countries, use VPN to connect into the WAN. Working to provide aid, development and relief programmes throughout the Pacific, South Asia, South East Asia and areas of Southern Africa, connectivity is unreliable and expensive in many of the charity's locations.

Grant Holton-Picard, Technical Infrastructure Manager at Oxfam Australia, comments, "Poor connectivity presented us with an obvious IT performance challenge. In particular, in-country staff access critical services such as Intranet, VoIP and web collaboration tools from head office. Limited by our bandwidth provisions, slow delivery of applications began to impact our staff's ability to work efficiently.

'In addition, system communications such as Active Directory synchronization was also a challenge, while the IT team in Melbourne struggle to provide remote support to field based systems or remote end users."

A business case was drawn up to address these performance issues, and the charity looked to advanced WAN optimization to relieve the network problems. Comparing a number of products, Expand Networks' was chosen as the preferred candidate based on its capability to combine traffic acceleration and file sharing services.

"Expand's ability to monitor, optimize, and control interactive RDP sessions and apply QoS techniques to protect VoIP also helped the product standout during evaluation. We immediately set up a trial between our head office an overseas site with poor connectivity, and we found Expand provided the acceleration to support our users' connectivity needs," continues Holton-Picard.

Oxfam Australia took the opportunity to deploy Expand Accelerators alongside the implementation of a wider infrastructure upgrade throughout its primary overseas sites. Users will benefits from a migratory approach to Expands capabilities; acceleration, traffic optimization and finally, Wide Area File Services (WAFS).

Oxfam Australia has successfully completed the first stage of the Expand project, deployed across 12 locations for acceleration, and now has a stable deployment in place already delivering results.

"Although we're only at stage one of the Expand project, we have already experienced positive improvements around providing remote support and the responsiveness of RDP sessions," says Holton-Picard. "We also have far better visibility into the traffic being utilised over the WAN links. With this information available, we will now be able to start fine-tuning QoS policies to provide improved prioritisation of traffic."

Traffic optimisation based on analysis of in-country sites, and the implementation of WAFS will follow in the next six months.