When enterprises such as Airbus, EADS or Lufthansa Technik require engineering support, they like to call on the experienced engineers of the Assystem Group. The engineering service provider Assystem Germany and a German affiliate, Atena, have over 700 engineers in Germany, covering all areas of technical expertise from aerospace and vehicle construction to wind power and shipbuilding.

Assystem Germany has seven locations in its home country alone – such as the branch office in Hamburg-Harburg, some 30 kilometers from the company’s headquarters, where, depending on the project, 30 to 50 employees develop aircraft parts and other products using 3D CAD tools. Assystem Germany backs up the resulting data to the headquarters using a dedicated line – incrementally at night and in full on weekends.

No Time for Full Backups

Until the end of 2008, the 2.5 MB provided by the dedicated line were just enough to transport the 50 GB of data to the central backup server during the weekend time slot of 50 hours. But when a new project suddenly meant that an additional ten GB of construction plans had to be imported, the available time became too limited for complete data backups. “When a weekend was no longer enough to carry out a full backup, we began backing up individual shares on weekdays between 8 pm and 6 am,” recalls IT manager Carsten Peters. “But that wasn’t a satisfactory solution: The countless backup jobs soon became unmanageable, and the daily incremental backups led to inevitable bottlenecks.”

More Bandwidth is No Alternative

Increasing the bandwidth of the WAN connection between headquarters and the branch office was not a viable solution for Assystem Germany. During daytime hours, the fixed connection has little Intranet and Internet traffic and any additional capacity would remain unused. And a faster connection would not necessarily have improved the weekend data backups either: “Even if we’d had more bandwidth available, the data backups wouldn’t really have run any faster,” explains Peters. “That’s mainly because of Microsoft’s protocols, which are particularly inefficient over the WAN. Because of its ‘talkativeness’, CIFS, for example, effectively only transports more overhead but not more useful data by using a limited bandwidth.”

Boost Needed for the WAN

On his search for a long-term solution, the head of IT attended an event on WAN Optimization to find out about the technologies involved. He then contacted his long-standing IT systems partner CROCODIAL with a specific inquiry. The company recommended the ProxySG appliances from Blue Coat Systems. These have already reduced the time needed to back up data via WANs by up to 90 percent in innumerable installations worldwide. Since Assystem Germany had already had over two years of good experiences using Blue Coat ProxySG and ProxyAV appliances to safeguard Internet access, the solution offered by CROCODIAL seemed highly promising at first glance. But before Carsten Peters placed the order, the products had to prove themselves in real-life scenarios.

Test Installation Reveals Huge Time Savings

To test the products, CROCODIAL configured a ProxySG-510 appliance for the company headquarters and a ProxySG-210 appliance for the office in Hamburg-Harburg, according to the specifications of Assystem Germany. Carsten Peters then installed the devices on site, simply connecting them to the network at first without activating the acceleration. During the process, the appliances delivered new and interesting information about the data traffic transferred on the line between the two locations. “The ProxySGs immediately showed us what kind of data we actually exchange,” says Peters, describing his initial experiences. “We found an application that wasn’t relevant to the company, for example, and removed it from our network directly.”

After the appliances had been running in test mode for a week, Peters and a service engineer from CROCODIAL met to finalize the configuration. Within an hour, Peters had sent the first 50 GB backup job over the optimized connection – and was astounded: “The job that always took 25 hours or more was suddenly completed in under 5 hours. The only alteration we had to make to our installation was changing over from the Veritas backup client to a direct backup of the shares via CIFS to give the ProxySG appliances full reign.”

Great Scope for the Future

After the convincing test phase, Assystem Germany immediately began using the installation for regular operations. The company now backs up the data – which has increased to 130 GB – to headquarters from the branch via the dedicated line in just 18 hours. The 50-hour weekend time slot gives the engineering specialist enough scope so that even large, new projects do not cause any problems. At the same time, the employees at the branch office enjoy faster access to the data at headquarters. Opening and saving a large PowerPoint presentation in Hamburg-Harburg now takes just a few seconds instead of several minutes.

The ProxySG appliances were not only the right choice from a technical viewpoint, as a look at the project costs shows, “More bandwidth combined with extra data backups at the branch office wouldn’t only have been more complex and less effective – it would also have cost a great deal more when looked at it from a three-year perspective,” explains Peters. “There is more than one reason why Blue Coat’s solution was the right choice for us.”