Mustang Engineering Boosts Employee Productivity with F5's ARN

Published 19th June 2008

Global firm with 4,000-user SharePoint site benefits from 60 per cent performance increase, maximising application investment and improving employee productivity

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that Mustang Engineering has optimised the performance of its recent Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment using the F5 Application Ready Network (ARN). Pre-deployment test results showed a 60 per cent improvement in the performance of Mustang’s SharePoint Server 2007 environment when supported by F5 solutions.

“We made a significant investment in SharePoint Server 2007,” said Keith Wingate, Senior Network Architect at Mustang. “If employees experience sluggishness with an enterprise application like SharePoint, they won’t use it. F5’s Application Ready Network ensures that we get top performance from SharePoint so that our employees can leverage this new collaborative environment to better serve our clients. This translates directly into a positive return on our SharePoint investment.”

Mustang, an independent services provider to the oil, gas, chemical, and manufacturing industries, deployed SharePoint Server 2007 to over 4,000 employees at the company’s Houston, Texas headquarters and its 12 other domestic and international offices. With help from Accudata Systems, a Houston-based IT consulting and integration firm with more than 26 years of experience, Mustang used F5’s ARN, deploying the F5 BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM™) with WebAccelerator™ solution to boost SharePoint Server 2007 performance and ensure a positive user experience. WebAccelerator is a web application delivery product that helps organisations overcome performance issues involving browsers, web application platforms, and WAN latency.

F5’s ARN is a holistic, application-specific network architecture and infrastructure designed for enterprise applications such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It provides a complete set of resources that simplify the design, deployment, and management of mission-critical applications across the network with F5 products, including step-by-step deployment procedures and pre-defined, validated web acceleration policies. By removing bottlenecks outside the application’s control that put deployments at risk—such as WAN latency—F5’s ARN improves user experience, strengthens security, unifies access control and enforcement, and ensures the superior scalability of 2007 Microsoft Office system applications.

Accudata Systems assisted Mustang with the selection and testing of its BIG-IP LTM with WebAccelerator deployment. “We’re seeing a sharp increase in the demand for services around SharePoint Server 2007. SharePoint is typically a very high profile and business-critical solution, so performance is key,” said Chris Laney, Accudata Systems Account Manager. “Our ability to walk in the door with the F5 Application Ready Network allows us to deliver huge benefits to our clients because now we can help them address deployment concerns up front.”

“Mustang’s use of the F5 ARN for SharePoint Server 2007 is an exciting, real-world example of the benefits that we’ve documented in our own test results, as well as the test results of third parties,” says Jim Ritchings, Vice President of Business Development at F5. “Using the F5 ARN helps Mustang deliver the innovation and quality they’re known for by ensuring that employees can take full advantage of the collaboration capabilities SharePoint offers.”

To learn more about F5 ARNs for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, and many more enterprise applications, please visit www.f5.com/solution-center/partner-showcase/microsoft.html.

To learn more about Mustang’s use of F5 solutions, please visit www.f5.com/pdf/case-studies/mustang-engineering-cs.pdf.