First Quantum Minerals is a growing mining and metals company with exploration and mining operations in several countries including Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Mauritania.

To meet the company's financial management and reporting requirements, a project to implement Hyperion was initiated. The challenge was to deliver the browser-based application across the organisation's constrained, high latency and heavily utilised wide area network (WAN) with acceptable performance.

FQM engaged Openet to design and deploy a WAN optimisation and acceleration solution utilising Riverbed Steelhead appliances. The primary objective was delivering good Hyperion performance, however, secondary objectives included increasing WAN throughput and reducing WAN utilisation.

Openet completed the design and deployment of the WAN optimisation solution prior to the formal rollout of the Hyperion application resulting in reports of good end-user application performance.

Significant reductions in the volume of WAN traffic across a range of application protocols were achieved with some protocols such at web traffic (HTTP) achieving a reduction of 90%.

Average throughputs of 2.5x to 3.5x the raw bandwidth are being obtained with peak throughputs of 30x the raw bandwidth!

Subsequent to a successful implementation of Openet's WAN optimisation solution, FQM has purchased additional Riverbed equipment from Openet to realise performance improvements at additional sites.

If your organisation works in a distributed fashion, over bandwidth-limited network connections, call Openet for a free initial consultation on your network optimisation options.