French National Railway Speeds Website, Cuts Bandwidth Costs with Redline Appliances
Campbell, Calif., December 10, 2003 — France's largest travel Website — the site of the French National Railway (SNCF) — has accelerated users' page-download times and significantly reduced bandwidth costs after installing Redline Networks appliances.
Users of the site, http://www.voyages-sncf.com, have seen a 30-40 percent improvement in page response times, and the site's management has realized a 30-40 percent savings on bandwidth, according to Patrick Maigre, local network manager for SNCF.
Deployment of two Redline appliances followed a major redevelopment of SNCF's ticket-distribution site, hosted at the Lille information systems center, into a true travel agency offering online reservations and purchase of train and plane tickets, hotel bookings, car rentals and tours. Voyages-SNCF is a joint venture with Expedia.
The site went online in 2001, and in 2002 logged 43 million visitors and sales of 272 million euros; today it averages 250,000 unique visitors and 45,000 reservations per day. The ongoing addition of new services, combined with annual traffic growth of about 60 percent, has led to the need for faster WAN speeds.
"To guarantee high site availability, reduce Web page display times and save bandwidth, our technical team looked for a traffic-optimization solution that would let the site handle the huge flow of visitors and ensure high performance," Maigre said. "In 2002 we tested several solutions and quickly realized that only Redline could provide us with the technical and financial gains we were seeking."
Two Redline units were installed in the SNCF network in May 2002. The appliances offload processor-intensive I/O tasks from servers and optimize traffic payloads in real time, speeding transmission of content to users and reducing bandwidth expense. By shielding Web and cache servers from incoming client connections, the Redline units also maximize available server resources.
"The dramatic drop in bandwidth consumption has considerably reduced our telecommunications bills — enough so that we recouped our investment in the Redline devices in a very short period of time," Maigre said. "We have also seen major improvements in client connection quality; now even the largest pages can be downloaded in less than 10 seconds. This deployment has been a real success for voyages-sncf.com and our joint venture partner, Expedia."
"The Redline units manage all HTTP session requests from the client, dramatically reducing server overhead," Anders said. "This has not only improved our Web site performance, but it will also lead to major savings on the amount of bandwidth GTA has to purchase in the future. This will future-proof GTA against anticipated bandwidth demand, and ensure that customers in our key markets enjoy quicker upload and download speeds so they can complete bookings and other online transactions quickly and efficiently."
About Redline Networks
Redline Networks designs and manufactures network appliances that maximize the performance, flexibility, and scalability of Web-enabled enterprise data centers. The company's family of E|X enterprise application processors, deployed at corporate data centers, and T|X Web I/O processors, used by Web sites, enable users to control and customize any HTTP-based environment while reducing infrastructure cost and complexity. Redline is a privately-held company based in Campbell, Calif. For more information on Redline and its products, visit http://www.RedlineNetworks.com.
