There’s no way around it: Expansion always comes with a price. And so, this year, as PCC Natural Markets opened its ninth customer-owned grocery store in the Pacific Northwest, management faced a serious question: Where were all the new hires in the central office going to put their desks? Building out its office space would have been expensive, so PCC decided to optimize its wide area network (WAN) so that employees could work from remote sites without any restrictions on access.

“For other folks, the ROI is somewhat different,” says Jeff Aaron, vice president of marketing for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Silver Peak Systems, the company that provided PCC’s solution. “Sometimes you’re spending a lot on bandwidth and you want to maximize that bandwidth. Sometimes you’re trying to do back-up or replication off-site, and WAN optimization can help with that. But with these guys, it was all about real estate costs.”

WAN optimization has been around for a decade, helping companies avoid having to buy bigger pipes for the transfer of data (going from a T1 line to a DS3 line can mean an increase of thousands of dollars per month). What is fairly new, however, is the process of de-duplication.

Basically, de-duplication software can look at all of the traffic moving across a WAN and ferret out the repetitive patterns. Then, rather than resending duplicate information, it is delivered locally. Take a 20-page PowerPoint presentation as an example: If just one slide has been changed, then that single slide would be the only one to move across the WAN.

In PCC’s case, the goal is to “leverage current technology as much as possible,” says Mary Beutjer, the co-op’s systems administrator. PCC is in the midst of integrating all of its systems, from ordering and receiving to sales, and automating as much as possible.

“There’s a lot of data that has to go back and forth between our stores and our office,” Beutjer says. “This just makes all of those file transfers more efficient.” That’s especially so with large batches, which previously were scheduled to run overnight.

“For the most part, things weren’t screeching to a halt, but occasionally, if we had to push down a bunch of information during the day with price changes or this or that, it would really slow things down,” she says. “Our primary goal in accelerating the network was to enhance the experience for those working at the store’s offices. That’s where there’s more of the impact, where people are happy with the performance.”

Future-proofing the WAN
When companies optimize their solutions for each individual application, Aaron says, each new version of that application may require an upgrade of the WAN optimization device. The difference with Silver Peak’s NX appliance, he says, is that it focuses on “future-proofing the WAN.”

Every few months, he says, “there’s a new application being introduced in the average store or enterprise. Every year or so, people are looking at new applications to bump up their bandwidth.

“Our whole goal is to create a really flexible solution [such] that we don’t care what application comes down the road, we don’t care what the size of your link is down the road — we’re going to give you a flexible environment so you can deploy optimization with confidence,” he says.

Based in Seattle, PCC is a certified organic retail cooperative with sales of $115 million and an active membership of more than 42,000 households. The largest organic grocery co-op in the United States, it dates to 1953, when the Puget Consumers Co-op was headquartered in a garage.

At its inception, Beutjer says, the cooperative was simply about people banding together to buy groceries at lower prices. Now, however, PCC operates nine stores that offer a mix of gourmet and organic foods, much of it locally sourced. PCC opened the first grocery store in the United States to earn LEED gold certification for “green” design, and the goal for its newest store in Edmonds, Wash., is LEED platinum status.

In the sweet spot
PCC fits into the “sweet spot” of Silver Peak’s focus on helping large enterprises, which is based on the size of the WAN (or how much data is being moved), the number of locations involved and the number of applications a company runs over the WAN. For her part, Beutjer couldn’t be happier.

“Pretty much anything that’s not encrypted is dramatically sped up,” she says, “particularly once it’s been previously copied. Once the devices have seen that data on either end, subsequent transfers speed up dramatically. Our people often work with large spreadsheets, and the time it takes to open them has been reduced dramatically. It’s the same thing for pushing down batches; they just disappear really fast, as opposed to slowly having to wait for the process to finish on our end.”

Beutjer also is pleased that installation is easy enough that she’s been able to do it herself with the help of Silver Peak technicians. A global management system provides templates for the installation, but the company also offers to place experts onsite to make it “as easy as possible,” Aaron says.