1. C A S E S T U D Y: Northwest Pipe Company
ABOUT NORTHWEST PIPE COMPANY
n Headquarters in Vancouver, Washington
n 8 remote manufacturing facilities throughout the U.S.
and Mexico
n Manufactures steel pipes
n Customers worldwide
CHALLENGES
n Aging infrastructure in data center and remote sites
n Did not want to increase bandwidth despite growing
WAN traffic
n Wanted to centralize data storage to better protect
and control data
n No disaster recovery capabilities in remote sites
SOLUTION
n Implemented Riverbed SteelHead WAN optimization
in data center
n Implemented Riverbed SteelFusion in remote sites
RESULTS
n Saved more than $1.4 million in capital and operating
expenses
n Remote offices now have disaster recovery/business
continuity solution
n Were able to significantly increase traffic load without
increasing bandwidth
n Data management simplified and improved through
data centralization
n All solutions managed as one rather than separately,
saving time, cost and resources
Optimization and Converged Infrastructure Helps
Pipe Manufacturer Keep Data Flowing
AT A GLANCE

2. Northwest Pipe Company C A S E S T U D Y
w w w. a d a p t i v e i . n e t
California (415-595-3054)
Oregon (503-675-0035)
Washington State (206-890-6222)
THE CLIENT
Founded in 1966, Northwest Pipe Company (NASDAQ: NWPX) is a manufacturer of welded steel
pipe. The company is the leading manufacturer of large diameter, high pressure steel pipe products
of the type used by municipalities for water transmission and treatment facilities. Although the bulk
of its business is in the U.S. and Canada, Northwest Pipe Company has customers worldwide.
Northwest Pipe Company also manufactures technologically advanced pipe and tube products for
a variety of other industries and applications, including energy, oil and gas; structural industrial; fire
protection; low pressure; and agricultural. The company is headquartered in Vancouver, Washington,
and has eight additional manufacturing facilities throughout the U.S. and Mexico.
THE CHALLENGE
While Northwest Pipe Company’s business strategy of locating its manufacturing facilities close to
its customers has paid many dividends over nearly 50 years, it has also created challenges – espe-
cially as the organization has moved from paper records to digital. One of the biggest was with data
management.
Although it had a data center in its Vancouver, Washington headquarters, most of the data related
to its remote manufacturing sites was stored locally on servers located in those facilities in order to
ensure fast response times for employees working there. Since the IT budget was not large enough
to support having IT personnel to manage the infrastructure in each facility, if there was a problem
that could not be repaired from headquarters someone from IT would have to fly to the location
to address it. In the meantime, the data was unavailable.
Another significant risk was that there Northwest Pipe Company didn’t have the level of data
protection in the remote facilities that it had in the headquarters data center.
“If there was a fire or other natural disaster, all the data from that location would be lost,” says
Jonathan Harris, Network Engineer at Northwest Pipe Company.
A third issue came with its growing data traffic. While some facilities had multiple T1 lines, others
only had a single T1. Knowing that data needs would continue to grow – and that the budget for
bandwidth would not – Northwest Pipe Company needed to find a way to coax greater performance
out of what they already had.
Realizing that its aging infrastructure in the data center and the remote facilities was coming due
for a technology refresh, in 2014 Northwest Pipe Company began looking into solutions to address
these concerns.
“We started out looking at performing a complete rip-and-replace of the hardware and software on a
one-to-one basis,” Harris says. “That would mean a huge capital expense to upgrade all the servers
in our remote locations. We also investigated ways to improve data security and add disaster re-
covery capabilities in each of the remote facilities to match those in the data center. Our expectation
was that we would have to find a way to integrate and manage several new technologies. Overall,
we were looking at a cost of more than $1.4 million just to mitigate the existing deficiencies. All these
changes were needed, but we knew it would be a hard sell to management.”
After reviewing several individual best-of-breed technologies, Harris and Northwest Pipe Company
discovered a vendor that could deliver a comprehensive solution that incorporated all the needed
improvements.
“When we asked
Riverbed who the
best choice was
near our Vancouver
headquarters, there
was no hesitation,”
Harris says.
“They immediately
recommended
Adaptive Integration.”

3. Northwest Pipe Company C A S E S T U D Y
w w w. a d a p t i v e i . n e t
California (415-595-3054)
Oregon (503-675-0035)
Washington State (206-890-6222)
THE SOLUTION
Northwest Pipe Company contacted Riverbed about its SteelHead solution for wide area network
(WAN) optimization, visibility and control, and SteelFusion converged infrastructure for remote of-
fices. Riverbed offered several advantages, including the ability to:
n Improve throughput without replacing all the data center hardware or increasing bandwidth
n Centralize control over all the data and eliminate local servers without affecting performance for
the users in remote offices
n Deliver a management interface that provides superior visibility into network traffic
n Enable a disaster recovery/business continuity solution without adding hardware or software in
the remote locations
Now the only question was how to implement it. Since Northwest Pipe Company’s small IT depart-
ment was already focused on other, more mission-critical initiatives, the company wanted to bring in
a partner.
“When we asked Riverbed who the best choice was near our Vancouver headquarters, there was
no hesitation,” Harris says. “They immediately recommended Adaptive Integration.”
It was a recommendation that made sense given Northwest Pipe Company’s situation. Adaptive
Integration (Adaptive) is a specialist in solving IT performance issues for organizations with users
in multiple locations. Many of its clients are organizations that had already completed a Wide Area
Network refresh only to find that performance was still below expectations. Adaptive’s engineer-
ing experts understand how to optimize application performance across many types of network
technologies, centralizing data to simplify management while delivering the speed of performance to
ensure employee productivity.
Adaptive assisted Northwest Pipe with the implementation of SteelFusion beginning in June 2014.
With SteelFusion, instead of storing data locally on servers it would all be consolidated on the main
storage area network (SAN) in the datacenter. A version of the data for each remote location was
then ‘projected’ out to the SteelFusion appliance at that site. Users maintained true local area net-
work (LAN) performance while IT obtained the benefit of consolidation.
The result was that Northwest Pipe Company could manage, protect and provide disaster recovery
services for the data at headquarters rather than having to replace server hardware and roll out a
data backup solution locally. Finally, the SteelFusion appliance supported disconnected operations,
which meant employees could continue working even if the connection to the data center was lost
temporarily. Adaptive began a test of SteelFusion between the data center and Northwest Pipe
Company’s Parkersburg, West Virginia facility.
The key questions were A) whether consolidating remote storage back to the datacenter SAN would
have a negative effect on performance at the user level and B) if the network could be optimized
enough to handle the additional traffic this solution would bring without adding bandwidth.
THE RESULTS
By all reports and standards, the test was a complete success. Users in Parkersburg noticed no
difference in performance after implementation. To them it was as though the data was still being
stored locally.
“We were very careful about checking to ensure the performance levels were up to user expecta-
tions,” says Harris. “Success really meant that they didn’t even notice the change to Riverbed had
occurred.”
“It was the
ideal technology
implementation
experience from
beginning to end,”
he adds. “I would
recommend them
to anyone that
wants to do
a better job
of managing data
while ensuring
top performance
in remote offices.”

4. C A L I F O R N I A • O R E G O N • W A S H I N G T O N S T A T E
Northwest Pipe Company C A S E S T U D Y
w w w. a d a p t i v e i . n e t
California (415-595-3054)
Oregon (503-675-0035)
Washington State (206-890-6222)
At its peak during the day, Northwest Pipe Company was able to push the equivalent of 20 Mbps of
LAN traffic across the WAN – all on a single 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Totals for the day showed a more than
60 percent reduction in traffic, which was the equivalent of adding 2.5 times the capacity to the circuit
but at peak times when the WAN bandwidth was most needed the increase was more than 13X.
At the same time, Northwest Pipe Company achieved its data management goals. Since all the data was
now centralized, the IT department no longer had to administer data or storage in Parkersburg, and all
data was being backed up in the data center’s normal disaster recovery operations.
Confident in the performance, Northwest Pipe and Adaptive began a six month rollout to the other
seven remote locations. Results were equally stunning.
For example, the Denver location has three T1 lines with a total bandwidth of 4.5 Mbps. After 24
hours of WAN optimization, on average nearly twice as much traffic was running through the LAN
interface. In addition, intermittent peaks on the LAN interface topped 200 Mbps.
During that same 24 hour period Northwest Pipe Company saw 90 GB of data move through the
LAN interface and more than 23 GB through the WAN interface. This resulted in an average reduc-
tion of traffic of more than 74%, and almost four times as much bandwidth as the company has al-
located physically. On occasions when a remote facility has lost the MPLS connection to Vancouver,
the office has been able to continue operating seamlessly until the connection is restored, which is a
dramatic enhancement to business continuity But perhaps most impressive was the cost savings.
“Before we could win approval for Adaptive to proceed we had to develop a cost comparison
between implementing the Riverbed solutions and simply upgrading our hardware and adding
disaster recovery at each location,” Harris says. “When we added up the cost of a straight upgrade
of our old WAN optimization solution, the bandwidth increases that would be required as a result
of that, replacement of server hardware in the remote locations, automated disaster recovery and
other factors, it would have cost in excess of $1.4 million more. The Riverbed and AI solution yielded
significant savings.”
Just as impressive to Harris was the quality of Adaptive’s engineering expertise and service levels.
“We had used a couple of other local integrators who were Riverbed partners for other technology
projects and were completely underwhelmed,” he says. “We had the exact opposite experience with
AI. When we vetted them we heard great reviews, and then our own experience was outstanding.
They planned intelligently around our schedule, hit every milestone and came in on budget as well
as on time.
“It was the ideal technology implementation experience from beginning to end,” he adds. “I would
recommend them to anyone that wants to do a better job of managing data while ensuring top
performance in remote offices.”
ABOUT ADAPTIVE INTEGRATION
Adaptive Integration (AI) is a West Coast-based technology performance company that specializes
in helping organizations around the globe deploy IT performance enhancing solutions that improve
and simplify application access from anywhere in the world. The company delivers these network
performance enhancements for organizations that want to deploy new leading-edge technology or
extend the value of their legacy technology. To learn more about what AI can offer your organization,
email sales@adaptivei.net or visit us at www.adaptivei.net.
“It was the
ideal technology
implementation
experience from
beginning to end,”
he adds. “I would
recommend them
to anyone that
wants to do
a better job of
managing data
while ensuring
top performance
in remote offices”