Lewis Group benefits from Exinda visibility, control and optimisation

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Lewis Group benefits from Exinda visibility, control and optimisation.

Lewis Group, retailer of household furniture, electrical appliances and home electronics throughout sub-Saharan Africa, is enjoying significantly improved performance of the wireless link between its Enterprise Resource Planning and Disaster Recovery datacentres, as well as superior levels of visibility of traffic, thanks to a highly effective WAN optimisation solution from Exinda, provider of next-generation WAN optimisation and network control solutions.

With over 600 stores throughout South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho, many of which are in remote locations, the need for a high quality link between datacentres is paramount for business continuation, as Gregg Abrahams, IT Manager at Lewis Group explains, "Our Disaster Recovery site provides full resilience and fail-over capabilities in times of distress. The company has a 100MB wireless network between sites and has migrated to a virtualised environment, the amount of throughput required to replicate data has increased tremendously and we found that 24 hours was not enough time to complete replication.

"We were introduced to Exinda by Bytes Systems Integration. A Proof of Concept (PoC) based on a pair of 8860s was highly successful. Even without full configuration we saw an instant 200 per cent increase in throughput. After adjustment to suit our environment we saw this rise to 400 per cent.

"Exinda has helped us to achieve significantly better performance on our EqualLogic SAN replication as well as delivering vastly improved QoS on our datacentre link. We have also been provided with an in-depth insight into traffic flowing to and from the Disaster Recovery site."

Exinda was chosen over other solutions at the PoC stage thanks to superior optimisation levels, fast and easy set up and configuration, and increased levels of accuracy and reporting delivered.

Talking about the deployment, Karl Barton, Exinda's Vice President of Sales EMEA said. "Lewis Group is a good example of how well Exinda can support critical business systems quickly, easily and efficiently in challenging and demanding environments. For retail businesses such as Lewis Group that have large branch office networks generating vast amounts of data, it's not just about optimization, because visibility and control are increasingly important tools in network and data management. Exinda delivers on all three, as Lewis Group can testify."