Barrick Gold is the worlds largest gold producer. Openet provides a range of ICT consultancy services to Barrick including the design and management of their wide area network (WAN) in the Australia Pacific region.

To address performance issues on some of Barrick's WAN links, Openet recommended the introduction of appropriate WAN acceleration technologies. Approval was subsequently received to implement a proof of concept project.

Openet is pleased to announce that the proof of concept project has now been completed with outstanding results.

The focus of the proof of concept project was a heavily utilised, bandwidth-constrained, high latency satellite link between Perth, Western Australia and Barrick's Porgera mining operations in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

The 192Kbps satellite link, with a typical round trip latency of 600ms, carries a wide range of interactive and non-interactive traffic including JD Edwards terminal sessions, Web-based applications, Active Directory, Exchange email and voice.

The performance of centrally managed interactive applications such as BMC Service Desk Express and JD Edwards was problematic with such limited bandwidth even with the use of Packeteer traffic-shaping technology.

To address the bandwidth problem, Openet implemented Riverbed Steelhead WAN acceleration appliances on either end of the satellite link. The Steelhead appliances have delivered consistent reductions in HTTP, MAPI, CIFS and general network traffic with an overall effective throughput of 2.2 times the underlying bandwidth.