Avoiding Spikes in Network Response Times with Exinda

If you want a good success story to learn from, consider this: Hempsons Solicitors, the UK’s largest specialist health and social care legal practice, saw its network response times increase by 200 percent at peak periods.

Sound like something you would want more of? Officials credited a new WAN optimization tool from provider Exinda with helping them improve that. In fact, Brett Raymond, IT director at Hempsons, told industry observer Stuart Sumner that network performance, specifically data replication, “improved by around 70 percent overall.”

We’re guessing you could do with such an improvement. You wouldn’t mind terribly? It would be nice to bring your response times down even if they’re not quite as ghastly as that, surely.

The firm found that their 270 Citrix users at remote sites were “experiencing poor network performance, especially when they needed to use printing services,” according to Raymond, who said when he looked into it, he found that the packet-shaping technology was “outdated, and users were complaining about response times.”

So they tried Exinda on an analyst’s recommendation, and found it worked pretty well. So well, that they wanted to see what else it could do.

“Later we started using it for data replication – that’s when we saw the 70 percent decrease in data going across the LAN. That saved us investing in new infrastructure,” Raymond noted, adding that “we were able to look at the data going across the WAN, and we could tweak the bandwidth as we saw fit. We gave Citrix traffic the lion’s share of bandwidth and then printing.”

Bottom line, everybody’s happy without a huge outlay of cash: “Our Citrix users now enjoy excellent application delivery performance. We have achieved this without having to spend more money additional bandwidth.”

And that’s a great bottom line to have.