Peribit Accelerates Lotus Notes and Mimix Data Replication Performance for United States Cold Storage.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Delivers Bandwidth Increase Needed to Deliver More Centralized Applications without Increasing Costs for WAN Services

Peribit(TM) Networks, a leader in application delivery over the WAN, today announced that United States Cold Storage, Inc. (USCS), a leading provider of refrigerated storage and distribution services to the food industry, is deploying Peribit Networks Sequence Reducer(TM) (SR(TM)) platforms as a strategic piece of its network infrastructure. After a rigorous selection process, USCS has chosen Peribit to provide the necessary WAN bandwidth and application acceleration needed for centralized applications, data replication, and business expansion.

Based in Cherry Hill, NJ, USCS operates a national network of 31 facilities across the United States to support more than 350 major food suppliers including Kraft Foods, Swift & Company, and Tyson Foods. USCS and its predecessor companies have been providing refrigerated storage services to the food industry since 1889.

According to Timothy Brennan, director of information technology with USCS, the company initially deployed its WAN in 1999 to centralize customer data and key applications such as e-mail, warehouse management, finance, and accounting, all of which had previously been run on standalone servers at numerous company sites. Centralizing data was critical to launching their customer-facing web site application, E-USCOLD, which allows customers to access information about inventories, order status, and schedules.

"While our WAN was initially targeted to support the web site and disaster recovery traffic, it has become a major underpinning of our entire business," says Brennan. "Once we got the WAN, everybody in the company wanted more and more applications."

Application Overload

USCS has rolled out numerous centralized applications since its WAN was initially deployed including Lawson Financial software, Lotus Notes-based e-mail, and the company's web-based Transportation Management System (TMS), which manages USCS's Logistics services offerings. USCS also uses Electronic Document Interchange (EDI) for exchanging files with customers. Data is replicated continuously to the disaster recovery site using Mimix software from Lakeview Technology, Inc.

This combination of bandwidth-intensive applications put severe strains on USCS's WAN, leading to significant user complaints about slow response times, particularly on the Lotus Notes and the TMS applications.

Thawing Out the WAN Response Freeze

Averse to increasing the already high cost of bandwidth and the arduous process of upgrading existing links, Brennan spent more than a year investigating bandwidth optimization alternatives before choosing Peribit as USCS's vendor of choice. At the recommendation of Innovative Information Systems, a Bridgeport, Conn.-based reseller that works regularly with USCS, Brennan tested Peribit evaluation units and experienced immediate improvement in application performance.

Brennan and his team have installed 30 Peribit Sequence Reducer platforms across USCS's WAN, using SR-20s at smaller sites and SR-50s at high-traffic locations such as corporate headquarters, its Nashville disaster recovery site, and the AT&T network operations center hosting its web site.

Currently, USCS is leveraging Molecular Sequence Reduction(TM) (MSR(TM)) compression, Packet Flow Acceleration(TM) (PFA(TM)) latency reduction, and bandwidth management -- all core technologies of the integrated PeriSphere(TM) architecture. Brennan is also using the PeriScope(TM) Central Management System(TM) (CMS(TM)) software to provide system-wide visibility into and control over application performance over the WAN. The PeriScope software also delivers an auto-deployment feature that allows newly installed devices to automatically find, download and install configuration files from a central location and begin operating without human assistance.

"While the amount of bandwidth that the MSR compression can recoup varies by application and traffic type, we're realizing 80 to 90 percent reduction in data traffic from our warehouses and between 50 and 60 percent in web traffic," said Brennan. "At the same time, Peribit's PFA feature is accelerating our overall traffic, but it really has a dramatic impact on our Mimix data replication traffic. And the template-driven bandwidth management tools within PeriScope allow my staff to prioritize applications across WAN links and allocate bandwidth among different applications. This is critical to ensuring that our transportation management system gets priority and a guaranteed percentage of WAN bandwidth."

Looking ahead, USCS plans to open new warehouses and roll out several more applications, including document imaging and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags as an alternative to bar codes.

"RFID is changing the whole supply chain industry," says Brennan. "A lot of data will have to be pre-sent via EDI. That's going to increase demands on the network. We're looking to the Peribit Sequence Reducer devices to help manage that growth so that existing applications continue to operate smoothly alongside new ones."

About Peribit Networks

Peribit Networks improves customer business efficiencies by resolving the technical limitations of WANs, increasing available bandwidth, and accelerating applications. The Peribit PeriSphere architecture is the industry's only integrated WAN optimization architecture that enables application rollout and webification, data center consolidation, and improves disaster recovery/backup and regulatory compliance for enterprise IT organizations. The Peribit Sequence Reducer and Sequence Mirror platforms combined with the SRS Software System and PeriScope CMS Central Management System software provide significant, measurable return on investment within months of deployment. Recently named Silicon Valley's second fastest growing private company for the period of 2001 to 2003, Peribit Networks is funded by top-tier investors Accel Partners, Foundation Capital, and Mayfield. Headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., Peribit has operations throughout North and South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia. For more information, please visit the company's website at www.peribit.com.

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