X

CETREL S.A., a Luxembourg-based company specializing in electronic transfers and payment technology, was facing challenges with managing their complex IT environment. They had been using sudo to manage their Unix/Linux assets and trace access from their support teams to applicative or generic users. However, as they continued to add Unix and Linux servers to their operations, they found that sudo was not providing adequate security over their logs as required by PCI DSS mandates. The process of reviewing sudo logs was time-consuming as it required accessing every server individually. Additionally, sudo logs could be altered by the super user, and the time required by system engineers to configure sudo was deemed unacceptable.

In 2010, a North American college approached B Virtual looking to offer their certification exams online in a proctored environment. The college had students taking online courses but writing paper-based exams. When the semester ended, the student needed to travel to a physical location to write a paper-based exam. The college sought a way for the student to take an online test while ensuring the integrity of the exam session. B Virtual knew they needed a trusted and forward-thinking technology partner offering a scalable, fast-growing solution for their live online proctoring program. They required a versatile technology to remotely log into a student’s computer while they were taking their exam. Having this monitoring ability prevented the student from compromising the integrity of the exam and provided a higher level of reliability to the colleges who were administering the exams.

Springhill Medical Center (SMC) was facing issues with its existing network infrastructure. The switches were failing due to heat and age, and high equipment and maintenance costs were preventing timely upgrades. The network was also difficult to manage and was a source of frustration for the staff. SMC needed to upgrade to a 10 GbE infrastructure to support its wireless capabilities, Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS), Allscripts Sunrise platform, and be ready to support emerging healthcare technologies. The new network also needed to be easy to operate and maintain, even for less experienced staff members. SMC also wanted to improve the return on its networking investment by achieving a longer lifecycle, reducing maintenance and support costs, and gaining greater flexibility.

Ajubeo, a high-performance cloud infrastructure services provider, was tasked with enabling customers to go to market quickly and cost-effectively using reliable, robust cloud services and cloud infrastructure. As an infrastructure and services company, Ajubeo delivers multiple gigabytes of data to its customers on a daily basis, providing compute resources, storage, and network connectivity. The company aimed to virtualize all aspects of the enterprise network architecture. Ajubeo executives set a company goal to create a customer-centric culture. To provide customers with the best infrastructure and cloud services possible, Ajubeo assembled a best-in-class network with solutions from technology leaders. Ajubeo stacked its network with solutions that deliver maximum performance and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) optimization, and positioned Brocade® switches and routers throughout its networking environment—at the access, core, distribution, and edge layers. With these industry-leading, cost-effective solutions, Ajubeo can offer better pricing while outperforming its competition.

The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) was facing a challenge of building a campus network infrastructure that could meet the growing performance and reliability requirements of next-generation applications while minimizing operational costs. The college was expanding its network of campuses and needed a network that was both flexible and scalable. SCAD’s flagship location in Savannah, Georgia, currently consists of more than 60 facilities spread throughout the city, with more than 100 miles of fiber linking these buildings. These sites needed to link with the new digital media center in Atlanta. The college was starting to saturate its 300 Megabit Ethernet link between cities due to its large-scale use of rich media, film and video editing applications, and its extensive use of replication in a Brocade SAN environment. Aware of the rising use of mobile devices on campus, SCAD sought to expand its network both at the edge and the core by rolling out 802.11n wireless in tandem with 802.1x security and Power Over Ethernet Plus (POE+).

Fusebill, a cloud-based subscription billing service provider, was facing challenges with its existing infrastructure. The company primarily used Microsoft products for its application infrastructure, including Microsoft Internet Information Services, SQL Server, Windows Server with Hyper-V, Office 365, OneDrive, etc. Initially, Fusebill used Microsoft Network Load Balancing Services (NLBS) to distribute traffic. However, NLBS was strictly limited to load balancing, and eventually, Fusebill began needing capabilities such as scripting and Layer-7 support. Another challenge was the annual audit for Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance, which required having a web application firewall. Fusebill was looking for an integrated solution that would provide a web application firewall along with advanced traffic management functionality.

United, a Netherlands-based company that is part of the Euro Media Group (EMG), provides personnel and equipment for a variety of television programming. The company manages more than 45 percent of all Dutch television productions aired and works with international broadcasters. United provides an end-to-end service for providers, including cameras, crews, and satellite uplinks. However, the company's existing network was struggling with video files hundreds of gigabytes in size, and the generation of about 16 terabytes of information daily, which then had to be prepared for various platforms. The existing network was not secure enough and was not up to date with the company's current needs. United was also consolidating operations by moving from four buildings into one new facility, which helped push the company toward a network infrastructure refresh.

Gilt Groupe, an online retailer with millions of unique visitors to its website and over 5,000 requests per second during peak periods, was facing the challenge of potential loss of a large percentage of its daily profits due to just 10 minutes of downtime. The company was looking for a way to ensure a consistently excellent customer experience, increase revenue, and decrease back-end costs. They decided that moving to a cloud environment would provide the flexibility, scalability, and speed of deployment they needed. However, they faced several challenges in moving their architecture into a cloud environment.

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) was facing challenges in providing its community with highly available, secure, flexible, and robust services for networking and other technologies. The university's previous campus networks were designed as individual Cisco hub-and spoke architectures on each of the three campuses. As UTSA grew, the team needed more network flexibility and state-of-the-art tools to meet its internal customers’ needs. Network traffic patterns across campus locations had changed, teaching methods had changed because of new technology capabilities, and traffic volumes had increased. In addition to the hub-and-spoke architecture limitations, the existing network equipment was reaching its end of life. For the IT team, it was an ideal time to reevaluate the core network and learn more about new, leading-edge capabilities.

HealthMEDX, a leading provider of software for long-term care, home health, and rehabilitation organizations, was facing the challenge of developing advanced software for healthcare providers more quickly and efficiently while keeping networking operations and capital expenses at a minimum. The company needed to adapt to the rapidly changing healthcare technology landscape and meet new regulations and government mandates transitioning the industry into the electronic age. HealthMEDX's comprehensive solutions give healthcare providers everything they need to automate their Customer Relationship Management (CRM), census, clinical electronic health record, and financial systems. However, being part of a dynamic industry meant that HealthMEDX had to know the needs of its clients and be able to immediately accommodate their requirements.

Kilgore College, located in East Texas, serves more than 6,500 students and 350 faculty and administration. The school has embraced digital learning and offers online classes, eBooks, and high definition videos of lectures. However, the increase in traffic was straining the campus network. Wireless connectivity and performance was sporadic, causing constant complaints from students. The old Cisco technology was ready for an upgrade, and the college wanted to compare options for a new network solution. They sought advanced technology in an integrated wired and wireless solution set that combined exceptional performance with ease of management. The solution also needed to be compatible with the school’s budget.

Infraserv Höchst, the owner and operator of Industriepark Höchst, a large industrial park in Germany, faced the challenge of building a highly available, multitenant campus network capable of delivering essential services to tenants. The park is a vital research and development site for over 90 companies from the pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology, and crop science industries. The legacy IT environment of Infraserv Höchst was complex and cumbersome, consisting of 50 separate networks belonging to onsite customers and several Infraserv Höchst environments that provided telephony and data network management services. The company needed to invest in the modernization and standardization of its IT environment.

Textile Rubber & Chemical Company (TRCC) is a multinational chemical and technology company with operations on five continents. The company provides products to the flooring industry, including coatings, adhesives, flooring finishing equipment, polyurethane backing, latex compounds, thermoplastic backing systems, specialty chemicals, and polymer modifiers for asphalt. TRCC is an early adopter of SAP HANA, which converges database and application platform capabilities in memory to transform transactions, analytics, text analysis, and predictive and spatial processing for real-time business. TRCC began its SAP HANA deployment in 2014 and continues to implement it across the company. TRCC also relies on a VMware environment with 300 Virtual Machines (VMs) and a Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with VMware Horizon View to automate functions and simplify desktop management. Supporting the company’s 22 divisions and 500 users are three IT staff members that support every aspect of IT. Just three. And they are busy. In the preceding decade, the network had been expanded in an ad hoc fashion, and the underlying network had not kept up with the new demands. The switches performed poorly, frequently rebroadcasting packets between network segments (packet storms) and resulting in significant latency. In fact, users’ keyboards in the VDI environment slowed so much that it affected their productivity. TRCC also experienced network outages with the old network switches. Although several business divisions could tolerate a rare, brief outage without adverse effects, downtime completely disrupted the SAP HANA application and the productivity of numerous TRCC employees.

Dansk Kabel TV, a trusted provider for multitenant homeowners’ associations in Denmark, faced the challenge of converging, migrating, and upgrading two networks to deliver rich TV, streaming video, Internet, and future services based on open standards. The company's acquisition of ComX, a Danish service provider, in 2013 significantly increased its customer base and added a second network to its infrastructure. As Dansk Kabel TV began to assimilate the ComX network and services into its existing portfolio, it was also a good time to plan for the future. Growth and current media trends demanded a high-capacity, robust infrastructure. For example, Dansk Kabel TV’s traffic volumes increased 100 percent in the past two years. In addition, High-Definition Television (HDTV) and streaming video content consume a growing percentage of overall bandwidth and show no sign of slowing down. The new network had to scale easily to handle these—and future—trends.

As Oncore IT moved more customers to the cloud, the company faced the challenges of data growth on its network and needed more shared storage for its virtualized and hosted solutions. In addition, 90 percent of its clients used a virtualized server farm for online backup and disaster recovery solutions. The company was experiencing performance issues with the network. At peak times, they were seeing congestion and packet loss. The issue was most pronounced when servers were accessing their HDS BlueArc [NAS/iSCSI] storage platform over the network. Latency was too high, and throughput wasn’t truly wire-speed.

Halkbank, one of the largest banks in Turkey, was facing a challenge with its aging, slow storage infrastructure that could no longer keep pace with the bank’s increasing I/O demands. The existing data center was quickly exceeding local energy availability. The bank's core banking, financial instrument, data warehouse, and customer relationship management applications reside on a SAN. It also supports customer-facing services including online, mobile, telephone, and TV banking, as well as credit card transaction processing. All these are mission critical to the bank’s activities. The SAN must interact with Microsoft SQL, VMware, and Oracle databases running on IBM mainframes. This creates a demanding data center environment that requires the scalability and flexibility to dynamically support growth and the addition of new services. Halkbank already stores large amounts of data and expects continued growth. Depending on current bank projects, SAN demand can peak at three to four times normal traffic. Dynamic scalability was a non-negotiable requirement. Availability and high performance were also primary requirements.

MyBuys, a provider of coordinated personalization solutions for display ads, email, websites, and mobile devices to retailers, brands, and agencies, needed to ensure flawless performance during peak traffic times such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The company serves up personalized content to online customers of many well-known organizations, and any downtime could significantly impact revenues. After setting up its own data centers in co-lo facilities, MyBuys needed a reliable and scalable load balancing solution to handle the varying server traffic and meet its service level agreements.

The University of Victoria (UVic) is a globally recognized, research-intensive university offering innovative programs for more than 20,000 students. UVic research teams connect to colleagues, cutting-edge projects, and powerful resources around the world through a number of networks. Many research departments at UVic require access to CANARIE, including the particle physics group. UVic’s particle physicists collaborate over the network with the international research community enabled by the HEPnet organization. Until recently, downloading a multiterabyte data sample took hours or days, and slow transfer times slow down science. UVic researchers are among 3000 physicists in 35 countries, all of whom are looking for answers to complex physics questions and publishing their findings. A saturated connection reduces the university’s competitive positioning among researchers’ peers.

Nikhef, the National Institute for Subatomic Physics, carries out research in the area of astroparticle physics. The organization's work has contributed to the study of the smallest particles of matter and the forces between them in the collision process within large particle accelerators. This includes helping to prepare experiments in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at the famed CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) facility in Geneva. Nikhef needed a network upgrade that would support thousands of researchers worldwide and provide enough storage capacity, computing power, and bandwidth for future needs. The organization was also looking for IPv6 support.

Sligro Food Group, a prominent name in the Dutch hotel and catering industry, was in search of a solution to support around 1200 virtual desktops that required constant replication between the primary and secondary data center. The company was using Citrix to access the back office, but with the end-of-support for Windows XP, Sligro started looking for a new uniform desktop. The company needed a switch platform that was compatible with Nutanix and offered a good price-quality ratio. The switch had to be a 10 GbE switch with powerful performance and ease of management.

En Masse Entertainment, an online gaming company, was facing the challenge of delivering an uninterrupted online gaming experience that keeps players in the game and the excitement streaming. The company was looking at spending more than $1 million in capital expense just to upgrade its internal infrastructure to the latest technology. With the business expanding into other games and a mobile gaming initiative coming to fruition, a new IT strategy was necessary to avoid soaring costs and the erosion of the user experience so vital in the gaming world. The company was expanding into Brazil, Australia and elsewhere. So any solution had to have a global footprint, with multiple data centers to avoid latency issues that can kill game performance.

Youth Dynamics, a nonprofit mental and behavioral health services agency in Montana, was facing challenges with its patchwork approach to voice and internet services. The agency had multiple providers, which proved costly and introduced performance and reliability issues. The staff also faced difficulties in knowing which carrier to call for support during service outages, leading to frustration and productivity losses. The agency wanted to consolidate its voice and internet service with one statewide provider to improve efficiency, performance, and reliability. They also sought cost transparency, cost savings, round-the-clock customer support, and data security to maintain client confidentiality and comply with regulations. Additionally, they wanted a converged voice and data IP network to future-proof their IT strategy and enable advanced video collaboration and mobility services.

The Utah Education and Telehealth Network (UETN) was conceived as an analog system for interactive video conferencing, but it has evolved into a high-speed network connecting public and higher education from the smallest school to the largest university. The Network now includes applied technology colleges, libraries, and healthcare clinics. The challenge was to connect school districts, state-run colleges, and clinics with a resource-sharing network providing education and healthcare across the state. The state's smaller communities are spread among three different areas: the Rocky Mountains, the high brush and canyon area of the Colorado Plateau in the south and east, and the Basin and Ridge Region that contains both the Great Salt Lake and one of the driest deserts in the United States. About 12 percent of Utah citizens live in these rural areas. That's about 360,000 people among Utah's nearly 3 million residents.

Ciena, a fast-growing networking technology provider, was looking to grow its IT services and deliver new capabilities to support business growth, while managing cost. The company was predominantly operating an internally focused model, which added its own levels of complexity in terms of patching, support, and maintaining large environments. As the company grew, it started to stretch the infrastructure requirements of the IT organization. The IT goals involved cost management, flexibility, and reliability. Predictability in cost and performance were two of the needs identified as critical to support the next wave of growth and business planning. The managed services model offered an opportunity to lock these in as part of service level agreements (SLA).

Landmark Implement, a leading John Deere dealer in the US, was formed through the merger of four equipment dealers and grew through further acquisitions. However, the company had not developed a real IT strategy for integrating these sites into a single operation. Newly acquired offices brought multiple vendors, multiple transport types, and varying levels of network performance. Centralized applications had no consistency and it was difficult to rein in costs as they attempted to stitch things together with technologies such as frame relay over leased lines. Amid this increasing complexity, John Deere also raised its expectations of IT capability among its leading dealers in the Large Ag Sector where Landmark plays. Landmark hired Brian Martin as director of IT to address these related challenges and opportunities.

Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts, a luxury hospitality brand under Hilton Worldwide, was facing a significant challenge with its Wi-Fi performance. The hotel's guests, who were largely tech-savvy and had high expectations for the hotel's amenities, were experiencing slow internet speeds. This was particularly problematic for business guests who relied on the internet for conference calls and large file transfers, and vacationers who wanted to upload photos and videos or stream content. The issue was exacerbated during the hotel's busy winter season when occupancy rates were high. The poor Wi-Fi performance led to a drop in customer satisfaction ratings and complaints from customers, which caught the attention of Hilton executives. The hotel's brand, market share, and room rates were at risk.

First Southwest Bank, a regional Colorado bank, was facing a challenge with its existing network. The bank's network was unable to keep up with their business growth, leading to constraints and impeding employees' ability to complete transactions. The network latency among a patchwork of various providers had already impacted customer service and the bank was prepared to expand its reach. The network performance also constrained the development of new programs for loans or online banking tools. The bank's own IT operation was affected by the poor network performance. The failover site for disaster recovery was located closer to the main data center site than they wanted, posing a risk in case of a natural disaster.

Barrow Neurological Associates was facing a significant challenge with their existing T-1 lines. The slow speed of these lines was causing complaints from doctors and patients due to the long time it took to access patient images and records from a centralized office. Additionally, the company was under pressure to implement a bandwidth-hungry electronic medical records (EMR) solution. The company had tested an appliance solution to boost the T-1’s performance, but it was still too slow. VPN solutions were also considered, but these also utilized slow T-1 lines. The company needed a solution that delivered high speed, while being easy to implement and manage.

Sysomos, a Canadian company offering social intelligence solutions, faced the challenge of managing a fast-growing business with shifting compute needs based on customer demand. The company's real-time insights and advanced sentiment analysis tools required constant uptime to monitor social media activity related to their clients' brands. However, the company experienced service outages with their initial colocation vendor, disrupting their business and causing a delay in returning to real-time monitoring. Furthermore, as Sysomos grew and attracted more Fortune 500 customers, the company needed an on-demand capability that could scale up or down as needed.

The financial institution heavily relies on internet access and real-time information communication, making network service continuity a business imperative. Three main areas of improvement were identified in the network infrastructure and service management. Firstly, the risk of outage was high as traditional Microsoft DHCP servers did not offer a real high availability and failover solution. Secondly, IP addresses management was inefficient as the use of spreadsheets showed strong limitations in terms of real time visibility over IP allocations, error prevention and scalability. Lastly, IP addresses, DNS and DHCP services were managed as three different entities with no real consistency between them, leading to high risks of misconfigurations, low management reactivity and expensive operating costs.