Wakefield Metropolitan District Council

With links from 130 remote sites into the central core of its network, Wakefield Metropolitan District Council wanted to increase the performance and usage of Citrix and Line of Business applications across its WAN.

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“Imerja was very accommodating during the evaluation and responsive to our questions when asked – the Exinda appliance has enabled us to take effective control of our Internet traffic helping us better understand usage patterns and improve performance”

Alan Kirkham, Service Director for Strategic Procurement & e-Services
Wakefield Metropolitan District Council

As part of a wider exercise to increase bandwidth capacity on its WAN links, the Council also wanted to understand the profile of the traffic traversing its 8MBps Internet link, and to have the ability to actively shape and modify that profile based on the report findings.

Following an initial meeting to scope the requirement Imerja facilitated a trial of the Exinda 4700, which was pitched against a competitor appliance as part of a product evaluation. The Exinda appliance was deployed between the LAN infrastructure and the Internet firewall, enabling it to transparently monitor all traffic traversing the firewall's internal interface.

Remote daily checks were made by Imerja over a secure VPN connection to ensure correct operation, and the Council established connectivity to the unit to interrogate the data that was being captured. With a straightforward and simple to understand Web based management interface the Council could easily navigate through the system and quickly establish an understanding of the traffic using the valuable bandwidth on its Internet connection. The reporting utility was configured to provide automatic and ad-hoc reports that were produced and e-mailed to both the Council and Imerja, the content of which was based on captured traffic and data properties up to and including Layer 7.

Using the detailed information produced in the reports the Council was able to identify problem areas and draft a list of recommended policies that would realise increased performance for critical Internet served applications by prioritising or restricting certain traffic types.

By the end of the evaluation the Exinda 4700’s monitoring and reporting functionality had demonstrated to the Council it was the right solution for its requirements, as well as being significantly cheaper than competitive products. As a result, the Council asked Imerja to immediately replace the evaluation equipment with a new Exinda 4700 appliance, and Imerja continues to provide maintenance and technical input in support of the installation.