Universities/Education Providers

Open University has implemented an intra-campus network located between two countries for sharing of educational materials and tools between lecturers and students. It also deploys voice and video conference facilities over the WAN link.

Challenge #1: Open University's WAN link suffered from a combination of low bandwidth and the long distance network links connecting the two campuses. This meant that data transfer was limited and suffered from high latency issues. Often, each application page might take several seconds to load and the overall system was unusable whenever more than five or six users logged on at the same time.

Challenge #2: Due to privacy and confidentiality requirements, some of the applications, including Webmail and grading applications, communicated across the WAN using SSL encryption. Open University wanted to have the capability to accelerate encrypted traffic in addition to non-encrypted Web applications, video, and a full range of educational and administrative applications.

Solution: Makani's Enhancer™ appliances provide app acceleration and WAN optimisation but also video distribution and management across the WAN. Furthermore, Makani appliances have the capability to accelerate SSL-encrypted traffic. Given the distance between the campuses, deploying Makani has been particularly beneficial as the technology is enabling students to access the same learning materials virtually simultaneously. Since installing Makani, Open University reported up to 100X performance increase and up to 75% bandwidth reduction.

State/Goverment Offices

The State of Verona wanted to regulate Web traffic and address productivity concerns. With a diverse population of up to 25,000 online users across 22 office locations, the solution had to provide very granular control without significantly increasing in-house maintenance or support requirements.

Challenge #1: The CIO of the network infrastucture wanted a true, enterprise-ready solution that could regulate online activity, prevent security breaches, and improve performance. In particular, any solution should quarantine all users to go through an authentication process to gain access, and traffic must flow through the network's firewall.

Challenge #2: The second unique challenge was to allow the divisions to secure network resources against spyware and other vulnerabilities so that they could easily provide Web antivirus, IM controls, P2P file sharing controls, streaming media controls, phishing attack unmasking, and bandwidth management.

Solution: Makani recommended deploying two high-performance Enhancer™ appliances at the division's Internet gateway. Significant improvements in security and performance were realized even though the implementation involved a very unique infrastructure. Furthermore, the network has accommodated the special requirements of the state law enforcement, which sometimes needs to access websites that normally would be off-limits to state employees.