Riverbed Helps Rockwell Collins Deliver Safe and Comfortable Aircraft Interiors to Travelers Worldwide

Riverbed SteelCentral and SteelHead identifies and solves application issues and provides quick access and improved uptime for critical applications

SAN FRANCISCO--()--Riverbed Technology today announced that Rockwell Collins Interior Systems, a leader in aviation cabin design and manufacturing, is using Riverbed® SteelCentral™ and Riverbed® SteelHead™ to ensure quick access to centralized applications and to improve uptime for critical applications. According to the company, SteelHead cut the time to access applications by half while simultaneously reducing bandwidth requirements by 60% and SteelCentral delivers the intelligent analytics needed to identify and resolve application issues quickly, allowing aviation specialists to spend more time developing safer, more comfortable airplanes.

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The Interior Systems division of Rockwell Collins, operating in 50 locations worldwide, is a leader in the design and manufacture of aviation interior cabin components such as oxygen systems, comfortable seating, cabin lighting, galley systems (including food and beverage preparation), advanced lavatories, and more.

The division houses all of its major applications in a co-lo data center in the U.S. delivering them across an MPLS network to remote sites. Major applications include Oracle, three ERP systems, and two Siemens PLM Software solutions: Teamcenter and NX design. The division also relies heavily on a number of proprietary .NET applications.

After centralization, access to the data was slow across the board, especially for locations that were furthest away or with limited bandwidth. “Everything took a lot longer to respond. Engineers would click on a drawing and then wait for it to download,” explained Chris Elder, senior manager of enterprise networks and data center operations for Rockwell Collins Interior Systems. “We can’t have engineers sitting around half the day waiting for things to happen on the network.”

Customer Story: https://www.riverbed.com/customer-stories/rockwell-collins-interior-systems.html

With productivity taking a hit, the division decided to deploy Riverbed SteelHead WAN optimization appliances throughout most of the organization, immediately boosting application performance while simultaneously reducing WAN bandwidth requirements by 60%. Elder also decided to improve visibility into the network to more quickly identify and resolve issues. He chose Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse, a network-based application performance management solution that is integrated with the SteelHead appliances. “I’m a big fan of Riverbed,” Elder said. “We used to get a lot of complaints about network performance from the users, and we don’t hear that anymore.”

The division also needed to address nagging application performance issues. “We are primarily a .NET shop,” explained Derek Turner, Senior .NET and SharePoint developer for Rockwell Collins Interior Systems. “We have 12 custom high-availability, internal and external facing .NET applications, and nine times out of 10, when I’m troubleshooting, it’s a .NET issue.”

Turner chose Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals, which captures and analyzes all user transactions, end to end, from the user device to the back-end while capturing system metrics every second. This complete application visibility allows IT to reconstruct incidents in the detail needed to quickly diagnose problems. Powerful analytics helps pinpoint issues down to code level allowing for faster problem solving. “Now if I get a report that something is timing out, which generally means it’s taking longer than 90 seconds to respond, with the information available to me with this tool, I can isolate the offending component in minutes,” Turner said. “This is the power of SteelCentral AppInternals.”

Gone are the days when Turner faced an unknown amount of time to first recreate a problem, then identify the root cause, and finally fix the code. “I can't explain how good AppInternals really is,” he added. “There’s nothing that I can't see or explain [with it]. Having a tool like this is life changing. Our development response time to deliver a solution to the business unit has been vastly improved.”

Riverbed Delivers Solutions for Cloud and Digital World

Riverbed is delivering solutions to help companies transition from legacy hardware to a new software-defined and cloud-centric approach to networking, and improve end user experience, allowing enterprises’ digital transformation initiatives to reach their full potential. Riverbed’s integrated platform delivers the agility, visibility, and performance businesses need to be successful in a cloud and digital world. By leveraging Riverbed’s platform, organizations can deliver apps, data, and services from any public, private, or hybrid cloud across any network to any end-point.

Riverbed SteelHead™ is the industry’s #1 optimization solution for accelerated delivery and peak performance of applications across the software-defined WAN. Riverbed SteelCentral™ product family is a performance management and control suite that combines user experience, application, and network performance management to provide the visibility needed to diagnose and cure issues before end users notice a problem, call the help desk, or jump to another web site out of frustration.

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About Riverbed

Riverbed enables organizations to modernize their networks and applications with industry-leading SD-WAN, application acceleration, and visibility solutions. Riverbed’s platform allows enterprises to transform application and cloud performance into a competitive advantage by maximizing employee productivity and leveraging IT to create new forms of operational agility. At more than $1 billion in annual revenue, Riverbed’s 28,000+ customers include 97% of the Fortune 100 and 98% of the Forbes Global 100. Learn more at www.riverbed.com

Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.

Contacts

Riverbed Technology
Katherine Harwood, 415-527-4170
katherine.harwood@riverbed.com

Release Summary

Riverbed announced that Rockwell Collins is using Riverbed® SteelCentral™ and Riverbed® SteelHead™ to ensure quick access to centralized apps.

Contacts

Riverbed Technology
Katherine Harwood, 415-527-4170
katherine.harwood@riverbed.com