Press Releases
Global Engineering and Construction Provider Accelerates CIFS Traffic with Juniper Networks
Aker Kvaerner Australia Speeds Large File Transfers and Collaborative Business Processes with WXC Application Acceleration Platforms
SUNNYVALE, Calif., October 25, 2006 - Juniper Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: JNPR) today announced that Aker Kvaerner Australia, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aker Kvaerner ASA, a leading global provider of engineering and construction services, has deployed Juniper Networks WXCTM 250 WAN application acceleration platforms to accelerate wide-area network (WAN) traffic between a project site in southern Western Australia, and design offices in Perth, Western Australia and Santiago, Chile. The deployment was completed in the first half of 2006.
"Prior to the Juniper application acceleration solution, WAN performance was simply too slow to allow our global teams to share important project documents in a practical or efficient manner," said Warren Dailey, IT Manager, Aker Kvaerner Australia. "Now, with the Juniper WXC 250 platforms deployed, our widely distributed staff can work efficiently as if they are on the same LAN."
Aker Kvaerner Australia, a part of the Aker Kvaerner Clough Murray and Roberts Joint Venture to develop mining resources in Australia, is designing and constructing an expansion to a major gold mine in Western Australia which requires the on-site team of 100 to collaborate and share documents with their colleagues in Perth and Santiago often in real time. However, because file-sharing protocols such as Microsoft's Common Internet File System (CIFS) were not designed for use across bandwidth-constrained, high-latency WAN links, the Aker Kvaerner Australia team found sharing the large project documents internationally was virtually impossible.
"The inability to have everyone access centralized files in real-time significantly hindered productivity," said Warren Dailey, IT Manager, Aker Kvaerner Australia. "While we have in the past deployed servers at our remote project sites, our continuing strategy is to centralize IT services as far as possible, and the Juniper Networks products have helped us to achieve this. Juniper has become intrinsic in the strategy and has enabled us to maintain a single instance of project data and significantly reduce infrastructure cost."
Aker Kvaerner Australia turned to Juniper Networks partner Netsolutions Australia, a specialist in WAN optimization, network security and enterprise routing solutions, to design and deploy a WAN acceleration solution that would optimize the link between Perth and Santiago. After evaluating products from four different vendors, the Juniper Networks WXC application acceleration platforms were selected for the task.
"The WXC platforms were the best choice for this project, because they compressed and accelerated the traffic and enabled Quality of Service," said Philip Johnson, Netsolutions' general manager. "In fact, Aker Kvaerner Australia was so impressed by the results on the Perth-to-Chile link that, in July, they implemented the Juniper application acceleration solution at the project site near Boddington in Western Australia."
Accelerating WAN-based Applications
The Juniper WXC application acceleration platforms provide distributed enterprises with a scalable approach to accelerating application delivery over the WAN. Based on the integrated WX FrameworkTM, which delivers all the technologies needed to accelerate applications and optimize WAN performance, the WXC platforms help businesses such as Aker Kvaerner Australia improve application response times, maximize WAN investments, and control and prioritize key applications.
Aker Kvaerner Australia employs Juniper's unique Application Flow AccelerationTM (AppFlowTM) technology to speed up CIFS transmissions across the WAN, providing remote users with a more LAN-like experience when sharing large files over long-distance links.
Another key WXC technology utilized by Aker Kvaerner Australia is the patent-pending Network Sequence Caching technology, which dramatically speeds the transfer of large files by eliminating repetitive data sequences. A built-in hard drive on the WXC platform supplies the capacity needed to store particularly large data patterns for long periods of time, enabling up to a 100-fold increase in WAN capacity.
The WXC platforms constantly communicate, exchanging vital information such as topology, accessibility, and path-performance metrics. "The Juniper Networks solution also enabled us to support VoIP, further improving productivity by facilitating collaboration with customized voice services without high long-distance communications costs," said Warren Dailey, IT Manager, Aker Kvaerner Australia.
"The Juniper Networks solutions are helping Australian enterprises overcome physical constraints to business," said Shaun Page, Juniper vice president of Australia and New Zealand. "The WXC platforms provide more than just faster file transfers for distributed organizations. The platforms are business productivity enhancers that enable customers to realize otherwise unobtainable collaborative efficiencies."
About Juniper Networks, Inc.
Juniper Networks develops purpose-built, high performance IP platforms that enable customers to support many different services and applications at scale. Service providers, enterprises, governments and research and education institutions rely on Juniper to deliver a portfolio of proven networking, security and application acceleration solutions that solve highly complex, fast-changing problems in the world's most demanding networks. Additional information can be found at www.juniper.net.
Juniper Networks and the Juniper Networks logo are registered trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.
