Expand Networks Accelerates Science from the
Sea Bed for Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Academic Fleet Accelerates Satellite Links and Improves Communications Efficiencies for Advancing
Scientific Research
April 21, 2010 09:55 AM Eastern Daylight Time
ROSELAND, N.J.--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--Expand Networks www.expand.com, the leader in
optimizing WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualization, today announced that its advanced WAN
Optimization technology is supporting satellite communication services for one of the world’s most important centers
for global science research, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego. Deployed
across one of the largest U.S. academic fleets, Expand’s Accelerators are improving the performance of critical
applications and communications over low bandwidth – high latency satellite links, enabling fast, reliable and cost-
effective communications between the ships and shore.
Steve Foley is a network engineer at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps Oceanography:
“Our research vessels need to squeeze every bit of bandwidth out of those fixed satellite links. The more data we
can send home, the better. The more satellite images, phone calls, support, etc. that the scientists on the ship can get
from shore, the better they can do their science.”
However, satellite bandwidth covering the world’s oceans is not only limited in terms of data capacity, it is also
extremely expensive. Foley explains, “Satellite is notoriously problematic for bandwidth acceleration, and we’d
resigned ourselves to sufficing with what we had. It was a case of ‘if only network accelerators weren’t so ineffective
over satellite links.’ Then we found Expand.”
Foley evaluated Expand Accelerators as well as Riverbed technology in the hope of overcoming these performance
challenges. “We found that Expand was the only one that had the features geared towards making our low-
bandwidth satellites useful. Our issues ar