Compounding our challenges was a shift in the type of data being sent across the WAN, with an increased emphasis on real-time traffic. Our lawyers began using video and multimedia increasingly, which placed added demands on our network infrastructure. We saw a constant increase in Internet usage as our employees used more rich-media sites such as MSN, CNN and . The firm is also gradually migrating from a mixed PBX environment to one built around 's IP telephony offering.

The above trends made it extremely difficult to implement a successful disaster recovery plan. With a thin-client architecture, we did not have to worry about backing up remote offices. But we wanted to ensure that all data centers where protected in near real-time, with failover capabilities between them. We had some of the most sophisticated tools in the industry to achieve this objective, such as 's SRDF application. These tools required dedicated and cost network lines to support the replication.

Taking A Long, Hard Look at the WAN

Linklaters took a long hard look at all of our applications to determine how best to overcome our scalability and performance challenges. We acknowledged that there was a need for more bandwidth, but the upgrade process had to be better controlled.

At the same time, we recognized that more bandwidth would not solve all of our problems and is extremely costly. Network quality, not bandwidth, was the main reason why our VoIP and Citrix traffic was not living up to our expectations. We quickly came to the conclusion that we needed WAN optimization.