Peribit Tables Expensive WAN Upgrade And Improves VoIP Call Quality For Furniture Retailer Raymour & Flanigan

Peribit Helps Double Existing Bandwidth, Enables Rollout of New Web-based Room Planner Application, and Readies Citrix Implementation

Santa Clara, Calif. – March 7, 2005 – Peribit™ Networks, a leader in application delivery over the WAN, today announced that Raymour & Flanigan, the largest furniture retailer in the northeastern United States, is pervasively deploying Peribit Sequence Reducer™ (SR™) platforms to more than double the bandwidth of its existing WAN, thereby eliminating planned circuit upgrades projected to cost more than $250,000 annually. In addition to realizing a rapid return-on-investment forecasted at less than 12 months, Raymour & Flanigan is able to successfully rollout a strategic web-based room planner application while delivering high-quality voice-over-IP (VoIP) services over its existing network, made possible by Peribit Networks’ data compression and Quality-of-Service (QoS) capabilities.

Starting as a family-owned furniture business with a single store in Syracuse, N.Y., Raymour & Flanigan has expanded rapidly to more than 60 locations with 2,600 associates across six states in the northeastern U.S. To support its 49 showrooms, three value centers, 12 customer service centers, and two distribution centers, the company uses a frame relay-based VoIP network to link all its field locations to the main data center in Syracuse.

According to Dave Foster, director of networks and telecommunication at Raymour & Flanigan, voice quality was already beginning to suffer on some frame relay connections when the furniture giant decided to launch a web-based room planner application. The graphics-intensive application, designed to help customers and salespeople map out furniture placement, virtually paralyzed voice traffic.

“If you were on the phone and fired up the application, the call was dropped almost without failure,” says Foster. “Yet despite its impact on voice traffic, the room planner application delivered enormous value to customers and thus the company was committed to its implementation.”

“Prior to upgrading any frame-relay circuits, we tried configuring our routers to give voice traffic priority, but this didn’t help much, Foster continued. He then began planning to more than double WAN bandwidth to support the new applications. All frame-relay links – 70 percent of which are 128 Kbps – were designated for upgrade to 512 Kbps. “We calculated the annual recurring cost to be more than $254,000 to upgrade the circuits,” says Foster.

Given the extraordinary cost of bandwidth and the headaches associated with upgrading existing WAN links, Foster and Brian Dewey, senior network engineer with Raymour & Flanigan, decided to investigate bandwidth optimization alternatives. Testing four Peribit SR-20 platforms produced significant and immediate results. Once the Peribit SR-20 devices were installed, Foster and Dewey were able to simultaneously run the room planner application and voice traffic without experiencing dropped calls or sluggish application performance. The dramatic results closed the deal.

The Peribit Advantage

Since its initial test of the Peribit gear, Raymour & Flanigan has successfully deployed 51 SR-20s at remote sites and one SR-100 at its data center in Syracuse. Presently, the company is leveraging the Peribit Molecular Sequence Reduction™ (MSR™) data compression technology and QoS capabilities to boost bandwidth and prioritize application traffic on the existing network. The company is using Peribit Networks’ PeriScope™ Central Management System™ (CMS™) software to gain unprecedented visibility into network traffic and application performance over the WAN, as well as for its unique automatic deployment feature.

“Statistically speaking, Peribit more than doubled our effective bandwidth,” says Dewey. “We’re consistently achieving 40 to 60 percent data reduction with our existing network. In fact, the performance of our 128 Kbps links with the Peribit Sequence Reducers and the room planner application is actually better than the ‘standalone’ link without the room planner installed on the network.”

Having successfully rolled out the room planner application alongside its VoIP traffic, Raymour & Flanigan is preparing another rollout of a large Citrix server farm. “We’re going to start with Microsoft Word and Excel,” says Dewey. “Even though this will add more traffic to our WAN, we believe the Peribit Sequence Reducers will continue to supply us with sufficient bandwidth and control that will allow us to keep WAN circuit upgrades on hold.”

The Peribit solutions will continue to pay dividends as Raymour & Flanigan rolls out its next-generation WAN to increase bandwidth and improve fault tolerance. To achieve these goals, Foster is using the SR platforms to load-balance between the company’s existing frame relay circuit and a more cost-effective broadband-based VPN tunnel, routing traffic based on application, congestion level or down circuit. In addition to freeing up capacity, the solution improves fault tolerance since the frame relay and broadband networks are on completely independent infrastructures. “Once again,” says Foster, “we are saving money and improving network performance using Peribit.”

While the additional bandwidth made possible by the Peribit data compression technology has been significant for Raymour & Flanigan, so too has the PeriScope CMS reporting tools. “Prior to installing Peribit, we didn’t really know how much bandwidth our various applications were using,” says Dewey. “If an application performed poorly, we threw bandwidth at the problem. With PeriScope, we now see how applications are behaving, which allows us to set the quality of service for specific applications to ensure they have access to the bandwidth they need for optimal performance.”

The PeriScope CMS auto-deployment feature also saved Foster and his team a considerable amount of time by allowing new units to be shipped directly from Peribit to remote Raymour & Flanigan locations without requiring any initial setup. Once the devices were plugged in, the auto-deploy feature automatically sought out the PeriScope server, found and downloaded its configuration file, and began operating. After the first few SRs were installed at headquarters, Foster never had to touch another Peribit device.

About Peribit Networks

Peribit Networks improves business efficiencies by resolving the technical limitations of WANs. The company’s integrated PeriSphere architecture accelerates application performance, simplifies application rollouts, facilitates data center consolidation, and improves disaster recovery, backup, and regulatory compliance. Peribit Sequence Reducer and Sequence Mirror platforms, combined with the Sequence Reduction System and PeriScope Central Management System software, accelerate applications, increase WAN capacity, enable application control, and provide unprecedented visibility into WAN performance. The result: greater employee productivity, more efficient use of WAN resources, and rapid return on IT investments. For more information, visit the company's website at www.peribit.com.