Country Meadows Deploys Expand to Support Server Consolidation and Enable Citrix Branch Office Roll-Out; Expand Accelerators Tackle Network Latency and Congestion Speeding Up Delivery of Citrix Over the WAN.

ROSELAND, N.J. -- Expand Networks, a leading provider of Application Traffic Management Solutions for the branch office, announced today that Country Meadows Retirement Communities has deployed Expand Accelerators in 14 of the company's branch offices to support the consolidation of local file servers and prepare for a wide area network (WAN) roll-out of Citrix.

Country Meadows is an assisted living community centrally located in Hershey, PA. As part of a server consolidation project, Country Meadows wanted to centralize the delivery of applications via Citrix Metaframe to 14 remote branch offices located throughout Pennsylvania and Maryland. Through Citrix, Country Meadows' branch offices would access applications such as Schedule Optimizing Software (SoS), a long term care financial management software, Move-N, a long term care marketing application, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. By centralizing application delivery, Country Meadows would eliminate the need for costly and high maintenance servers at local branch offices.

However, the Country Meadows' network was not up to the task. After preliminary investigation, the IT team concluded that application response times would be unacceptable and that the WAN would not be able to handle the increase in traffic resulting from the Citrix deployment and the centralization of IT services.

"We were not willing to give up on the server consolidation project and the implementation of Citrix because, in addition to the tremendous cost savings, it was a means to simplify the management of our infrastructure," noted Craig Dieck, IT Manager at Country Meadows. "We turned to our local Citrix representative who recommended the Expand Accelerators as a complementary solution that would boost and improve application response times by increasing WAN efficiency and mitigating the effects of network latency."

Expand Accelerators aid in the widespread deployment of Citrix Metaframe solutions by increasing the number of Citrix user sessions by 4x and accelerating Citrix response times and print jobs by 400%, without making a single alteration to the existing WAN infrastructure.

"The Expand Accelerators were an excellent fit," continued Mr. Dieck. "They sped up application delivery to the edge, by an average of 300% with peak acceleration of 1000%. With the Expand Accelerators in place we were able to consolidate servers and centralize application delivery via Citrix without upgrading our remote WAN access. This has ultimately resulted in an annual savings of $80,000.

"These results are typical in a Citrix environment. The Expand Accelerator optimizes Citrix end-user experience, boosting performance through optimization techniques that increase available WAN capacity, guarantee bandwidth and eliminate effects of network latency," said Ariel Shulman, Vice President of Product Management at Expand Networks. "Country Meadows joins the ranks of hundreds of organizations that have deployed Expand Accelerators to fully leverage the power of Citrix server-based computing solutions."

About Expand Networks

Expand Networks is a leading provider of Application Traffic Management solutions for the branch office. The company's Accelerators take Application Traffic Management to the next level by employing a modular and intelligent application architecture that eliminates complexities associated with traditional traffic management solutions. The Accelerators automatically adapt to changes in traffic, remove WAN inefficiencies and maximize the performance of distributed enterprise applications. The Accelerators combine many unique features including next-generation WAN compression, application-specific acceleration, Layer 7 QoS and sophisticated monitoring and reporting. Expand has shipped over 20,000 Accelerator devices to more than 1,000 customers including Motorola, Continental Airlines and the United States Department of Defense. Expand Networks is headquartered in Roseland, New Jersey with offices in Australia, Dubai, Germany, Israel, Italy, Singapore, South Africa, United Kingdom and throughout the United States. To learn more, visit www.expand.com or call [phone].

Expand Networks, Accelerator System 9000, Accelerator Server, Accelerator 6800 Series, Accelerator 4800 Series, Accelerator 4000 Series, Accelerator 1800 Series, HTTPS Accelerator Series and ExpandView are trademarks of Expand Networks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.