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DECA Financial Services, an accounts receivable management (ARM) agency, was founded in 2009. The founders had previously experienced significant capital expenditures on IT infrastructure and the personnel required to manage it. As a result, they determined that a cloud hosting provider with scalability and ease-of-use was necessary to host the company’s technology platform for the 2009 launch of DECA. The company operates in highly competitive environments within the ARM industry and frequently outperforms well-known players in the market. DECA tasked Milestone Advisors with finding an infrastructure solution that would enable flexibility and scalability.

eGov Strategies, a SaaS company, was facing challenges with maintaining and procuring systems that weren’t strategic to their business. They were spending too much time on these tasks, which was taking away from their core business operations. Additionally, they were facing increasing pressures on security and compliance due to their success with larger clients. They needed to improve the resiliency and robustness of their solutions by expanding their protection and security capabilities. They also needed a solution that would scale as they added municipalities.

A centralized IT architecture for governments is not uncommon; yet the complex nature of the network can provide challenges. With a single overarching IT organization and several sub-organizations operating semi-independently, building the requirements can be confusing, particularly when the sub-organization’s requirements differ from those of the parent organization. The organization had specific requirements for their production and recovery environment to ensure continuity of service and network security. The first requirement stemmed from the concern that certain administrative staff needed access to their application, but due to the architecture of how their parent organization’s network was designed, they were having trouble identifying where the user originated from and how to gate the access and permissions each user should have. The second requirement the client requested was the ability to do extended tests for their recovery solution.

LiveAir Networks, a local wireless ISP launched in 2004 in Smithville, Texas, faced the challenge of providing high-quality internet connectivity to a sparsely populated area where it was too costly for major carriers to offer services. The company needed to scale its operations to deliver Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) access and bandwidth-intensive services, such as video and voice over IP. In 2012, LiveAir began building its 660-mile, monofiber, Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) network—dubbed the TexasBone—that would allow the company to extend high-speed fiber optic services to rural homes. Since the TexasBone went live, LiveAir has experienced 300 to 400 megabits of new bandwidth demand every quarter. The company needed a cost-effective, easily manageable, and highly scalable network to deliver high-quality services at competitive prices.

The Huntington Beach Union High School District in Southern California was facing a challenge with its outdated network infrastructure. The district, which encompasses six high schools, one day school, and two adult schools, with more than 16,000 students and 1,500 staff and faculty, was experiencing oversubscription, speed, connectivity, and latency issues, and packet loss due to the increased demands of digital learning and Common Core (Smarter Balanced) testing. On any given day, more than 10,000 wireless devices connect to the school district’s network, and the aging infrastructure was faltering under the increased demands. The district wanted to deploy a new wireless network to support its thousands of users and meet its Common Core requirements.

The M Resort, a 90-acre Las Vegas casino-resort, was looking to gain a competitive advantage in the dynamic environment of Las Vegas. The resort wanted to develop and deliver innovative gaming applications and advanced IP unified communications services (data, voice, wireless, and video) throughout the resort over a highly reliable network that must be available on a 24×7 basis. The resort was also looking to reduce operating costs and scale quickly to support increased bandwidth demands. The network had to be flexible enough to adapt easily to the newest gaming applications and guest or conference requests.

MoldRite Plastics, a plastic-cap manufacturer, was facing challenges in integrating networks, applications, and users from two recent acquisitions. The performance of their Storage Area Network (SAN) and multiple applications was not meeting their needs. The company was also transitioning to Gigabit Ethernet, but the budget for upgrading from Fast Ethernet was extremely limited. The IT department was aware that Gigabit Ethernet would solve their current problems and support the company’s future plans for new applications. However, they were facing issues with switch saturation causing speed problems for users, and they anticipated that 1 Gigabit Ethernet and possibly 10 Gigabit Ethernet would be necessary for upcoming projects.

The University of Bern, Switzerland, realized that its core routers were at their end of life, and that it needed to upgrade them to remain a leading research institution. Video streaming, a larger population of mobile devices, and new research applications were pushing the network’s capacity. The research requirements were especially stringent. The university leads four National Centers of Competence in Research (NCCR): Climate, NorthSouth, Trade Regulation, and TransCure. Additionally, it supports the NCCR MUST research program, which brings together 16 Swiss research groups working across the fields of physics and chemistry, with ETH Zurich.

WAGO Kontakttechnik GmbH & Co. KG, a global leader in the electrical interconnections and automation markets, was facing challenges with its IT systems. The company's network lacked high availability, scalability, and standardization. The company was experiencing capacity bottlenecks due to continuous growth and the need for more ports. The creation of a new administration building at its headquarters in Minden provided the catalyst for upgrading the infrastructure. The IT team needed to connect a large number of Ethernet ports to the network and ensure that the newly expanded network could keep pace with current and future performance needs. The network required an overhaul to handle the growing bandwidth demands. In addition to increased bandwidth, WAGO required a solution that could support 10 GbE interfaces via MultiChassis Trunking (MCT).

Finansbank, a steadily growing bank owned by the National Bank of Greece and headquartered in Istanbul, was facing challenges with its legacy SAN resources due to the increasing volume of banking transactions. The bank's storage had reached three and a half petabytes, and keeping pace with growth was becoming challenging. The bank's open-system SANs were built as redundant networks in three separate rooms, and connecting these rooms required extensive cabling. Often, cabling issues affected ISL throughput, negatively impacting application performance. Scaling the SAN to increase capacity created complexity, and changing the legacy infrastructure to accommodate new workloads was also difficult. If the storage team had to move or add a device, they might need to physically move ports and re-cable devices, which significantly increased management cycles and costs.

Cybercom, an IT consulting company with 1400 employees in seven countries, was facing the challenge of an aging infrastructure in Finland that was nearing the end of its life. The company needed better performance and more bandwidth, and it wanted to move to a more simplified, flexible network architecture. The biggest driving factor for Cybercom was the need for speed. The organization was looking for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) speeds in the core of its data centers. In addition, the company wanted to unify the network fabric. At the time, they had a separate Storage Area Network (SAN), and they decided that when they moved to 10 GbE and an Ethernet fabric infrastructure, they would essentially merge the two environments to radically simplify overall management.

Yahoo! JAPAN was looking to automate the deployment of network services at scale in a private cloud using the OpenStack framework. They wanted to maintain dynamic control of network operations for a large-scale private cloud and enable administrators to manage load balancing resources while abstracting the operational requirements for users. The existing LBaaS functionality in OpenStack was limited to host-based load balancing via HAProxy and did not support third-party vendor plugins. As a result, the base implementation of OpenStack was not able to satisfy Yahoo! JAPAN’s immediate requirement to support a large-scale multitenant environment.

NovaTel, a leading wholesale provider of voice, data, and facilities services, was facing challenges with the growing demands of Voice over IP (VoIP) calling features. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) that underlies VoIP and other telecommunication services uses a call setup phase and a data transfer phase, which requires additional processing across the network. As the volume of SIP and VOIP calls grew, it became increasingly difficult to quickly connect large numbers of calls because they had to be routed to the network core before being sent to an outside connection. Automatic dialing systems, which are commonly used in large-scale calling campaigns, also affected call quality. If one customer turned on automatic dialing capabilities, the additional tax on bandwidth often led to packet loss and call degradation for all customers. With higher bandwidth demands on the IP network, NovaTel’s data center had become a chokepoint. It was clear that the data center now had to provide more than just powerful backend computing hosting. It had to become NovaTel’s “front door” to its customers, allowing the company to engage with customers through a wide range of devices and applications.

Colorcon, a company that provides a wide range of film coatings, modified release technologies, and excipients used by pharmaceutical and nutritional supplement companies, faced a challenge with its centralized applications. The company has offices in 25 countries, all linked to the main data center in Pennsylvania where business-critical applications have been centralized. The main enterprise application is Oracle e-Business Suite, but there are 80 applications in total, including legacy and regulatory applications, that are delivered to the remote sites over the network. The challenge was to ensure that these applications perform well across the globe. The company had an open-source load balancer, which was seen as a potential problem as it was non-enterprise class, had no support or in-house expertise, and didn’t provide visibility into application performance, particularly the end-user experience.

Mediamarket, a leading consumer electronics retailer in Italy, wanted to enhance the customer experience in its stores by introducing Wi-Fi. The company wanted to provide wireless coverage to all of its stores, supporting a large number of clients including laptops, smartphones, and Smart TVs. The technical requirements of the project emphasized security, service availability, and scalability of the solution. The company also wanted a solution that could support multiple simultaneous connections and the eventual addition of VoIP over Wi-Fi. The solution needed to be flexible to provide optimal coverage for different store layouts.

Shelton State Community College, part of the Alabama Community College System, was facing a challenge of providing a high-performance, high availability network that supports teaching and learning, rapid growth, and demanding applications. The college needed full line-rate performance from the network edge to the core to meet day-to-day computing requirements for labs and classrooms, which can vary greatly. It also needed high availability, because education cannot stop if a network system goes down. The new network had to support the college’s aggressive virtualization plans, as well as a new Voice over IP (VoIP) deployment. Ease of management was important, and of course, price was a factor.

Applied Discovery, a leading provider of electronic legal discovery services, was facing resource limitations within their data centers due to skyrocketing data volumes. The company's storage demands were escalating along with its business, and it was running up against space and power limitations at its hosted facility. The facility could only provide 150 watts of power per square foot, or approximately 3000 watts per rack. Because of the large size and power consumption of its legacy SAN directors, Applied Discovery was unable to conserve space by mounting two devices in a single rack. The systems also presented port density issues. Their expansion blades shared a common backplane, which meant that hundreds of storage devices could compromise the systems’ performance. Moreover, reliability issues often required administrators’ attention and potentially threatened to impact the SLAs.

CyrusOne, a provider of mission-critical, carrier-neutral data center facilities, aimed to enable its customers to exchange massive amounts of data at high speeds by extending their cloud connectivity ecosystem across its facilities nationwide. The company sought to deliver a cost-effective platform for transparent interconnections by deploying MPLS/VPLS technology. It also aimed to meet customer demand for high service levels and redundant interconnections with a highly resilient network architecture. Furthermore, CyrusOne wanted to improve business agility and service delivery times with rapid provisioning of new Ethernet ports. The company also aimed to provide investment protection and support for future bandwidth needs with high-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 100 GbE scalability, supporting terabit LAG capacities.

Westman Communications Group, a customer-owned cooperative that provides cable TV, Internet, and phone services to communities throughout western Manitoba, Canada, was facing a challenge. Their subscriber base was growing steadily, but exponential increases in bandwidth consumption across its customer base were straining its network. The company's primary routing equipment was housed at its Brandon headquarters location. A pair of Cisco 7600 Series routers with 10 Gbps supervisor cards carried the majority of the traffic load, while several Cisco Catalyst 3750 switches were deployed in Toronto operating as Layer 2 switches. However, as Internet routing tables had grown substantially, the network's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Internet routing was disrupted, reducing overall network performance. Westman also wanted to add intelligent routing capabilities at the network edge to reduce the burden on the primary routers.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was engaged by a leading life and pensions company, headquartered in London, to build out a new data center. The client's existing data center incorporated a diverse range of technologies and systems, resulting in a complex network that demanded intensive management and extraordinary amounts of time to bring a new service to market while increasing operation costs. Infrastructure age and complexity also restricted the company’s ability to scale to meet growing business requirements. More than 8,000 users needed access to enterprise applications and resources that resided on mainframes and servers, and storage demands were steadily increasing. The data center network also had to support quality of service for voice traffic. The new data center had to be able to support multitenancy and enable a path to SDN. At the same time, TCS needed to migrate all applications and millions of policies to the new data center with no changes to IP addressing of the application systems.

Singing River Health System, a healthcare provider in Mississippi and Alabama, faced a significant challenge in delivering superior patient care by sharing clinical information among hospitals and community medical clinics over a high-performance, reliable network. The need for a robust and reliable network was underscored by the experience of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated the region and highlighted the importance of disaster recovery solutions. The organization began to redesign its IT network, data storage, and backup capabilities to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster. In addition, a plan was developed to support the growing bandwidth demands of its Electronic Health Records (EHR), medical images, analytics, and mobility. As clinical data, images, and video continued to increase and strain network bandwidth, response time, and network uptime, Singing River executives realized that their goal of seamless sharing of clinical information among hospitals, clinics, and physician offices required upgrading the health system’s IT infrastructure.

CDE Lightband, a leading municipal utility provider in Clarksville, Tennessee, was facing high-bandwidth demands driven by High-Definition Television (HDTV) and video-on-demand services. The company was experiencing pixelation at peak times and needed a platform that would scale to support Layer 3, 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), carrier-class features, and other future upgrades. By providing 1 GbE to each of its customers, CDE Lightband aimed to solidify its position as the leading service provider in Clarksville and reduce competitive pressure from outside providers. The company also wanted to offer unique Ethernet services while keeping pace with its customers’ expanding triple play requirements.

SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY, is the only academic medical center in central New York. The affiliated Upstate University Health System serves 1.8 million people, often the most seriously ill and injured, and includes two hospitals and numerous satellite sites. Three and a half years ago Upstate University Health System decided to adopt electronic health records (EHR). Chris Loughlin, Citrix certified administrator and Epic Client Systems Manager, was brought in along with two others to manage the Windows and Citrix infrastructure for the project. Upstate chose the Epic solution from Epic Systems Corporation as its EHR software, and runs it as a server-based, Citrix-published application. Upstate has more than 30 Citrix servers with Epic Hyperspace applications installed. End users go to any web browser and launch the Epic Hyperspace application, which then links to a variety of Epic auxiliary applications. “Epic is, by far, the health system’s most widely used application, with between 2,700 and 3,500 concurrent users depending on the time of day,” Loughlin explains. According to Loughlin, Epic requires load balancing – to handle the load as more people come online, to allow updates without affecting users, and to balance the traffic among Epic’s front-end and auxiliary applications. Epic Systems leaves the choice of the load balancer up to its customers. At the same time, New York State provided funding for green initiatives, which led Upstate to decide to virtualize as much of the EHR system as possible, including load balancing.

Miller Welding & Machine Company, a family-owned business providing metal fabrication, welding, machining, finishing, and mechanical assembly services for leading manufacturers, aimed to become a world-class supplier by using innovation to continually enhance operations and support growth. The company specializes in high-mix, low volume products, ensuring exceptional quality for small runs of many types of parts and consistently meeting high customer expectations for correct deliveries within narrow delivery windows. As the company grew, it needed to upgrade its network to an enterprise-class infrastructure to support next-generation manufacturing automation applications and services. High performance was the primary criteria, with high availability a close second. The network had to be able to withstand machine shock conditions and operate 24 hours a day at 99.999 percent availability. Miller Welding wanted integrated switching, wired, and wireless connectivity so that data was available everywhere—from warehouses and loading docks to representatives across the United States.

RackCorp, a well-known Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, was experiencing rapid growth due to the success of its Content Delivery Network (CDN), CacheCentric. The company's traffic increased by 100-fold over a 12-month period, and its partner program grew by 60 percent. This growth, along with increasing customer demand for server backup and data center services, highlighted the need for greater scalability and accelerated the company's network upgrade timetable. RackCorp maintains a presence in 10 countries and 22 data center Points of Presence (PoPs), each with diverse capabilities for delivering network, dedicated server, virtual server, and cloud services. The company needed to quickly move from 1 Gbps interfaces to 10 Gbps interfaces to keep pace with its growth.

West Carolina Tel, a small rural service provider in South Carolina, was looking to expand its services and increase revenue by delivering superior, high-definition IPTV service to business and residential customers. The company faced stiff competition from cable providers who dominated the television market. To stand out, West Carolina Tel needed to offer better price packages and exceptional High-Definition (HD) TV. The company introduced television services in 2003, which required upgrading and improving the network, and selecting an industry-leading IPTV platform. The company had relied on Brocade® networking solutions for more than a decade and chose Brocade again to support IPTV.

RocketSpace, a San Francisco-based tech accelerator, needed a reliable, flexible, platform-agnostic campus network solution to meet the growing demands of new media and technology companies. The company provides office space to more than 100 new media and technology companies at any given time, offering a multitude of services to keep them on the path to success. The companies sharing the space are growth-focused and require high-speed Internet access, gadget-friendly meeting rooms, ergonomic furniture, and an advanced network that can handle any of their demands. When RocketSpace opened its doors to the public, it inherited an ad hoc campus LAN. The network covered 42,000 square feet of office space, almost 500 desks, and countless mobile devices. The expanding client list pushed the LAN beyond its limits.

The aging Meskwaki network was in sore need of an upgrade. For the last 10 years, the casino had been adding networking infrastructure arbitrarily whenever a bottleneck appeared in the network. The resulting LAN was a mish-mash of products from multiple vendors that consistently experienced performance issues—and kept the 10-person IT team constantly busy. Simple jobs, such as running network usage reports, would take 30 or 45 minutes to complete, and the toll on the network was huge. The hotel’s network was also vulnerable to spam, and there was even one incident of someone spoofing its IP address. Meskwaki needed a complete network overhaul, and Kranig chose Brocade to introduce advanced networking technology throughout the casino property. Kranig and his team wanted to beef up security, address traffic bottlenecks and performance issues, and streamline their switches.

MediaNet Digital, a New York-based company, provides content and technologies that enable brands to offer music and video download and subscription services to their customers. The company stores over a petabyte of digital content in a NAS environment, adding nearly a terabyte of new content every week from content providers. MediaNet Digital tracks consumer transactions via its partners’ Web sites and the company must compile this data into reports. However, the process of generating daily billing and activity reports was becoming increasingly time-consuming and the reliability issues with their storage solution were becoming more problematic as their demands grew. The company also maintains strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with its partners, making it crucial to find an advanced, enterprise-class solution.

Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) is a global health research institute that conducts large clinical trials and population studies. The institute is linked to more than 1,500 hospitals or clinical locations in 86 countries. PHRI studies have enrolled more than 1,000,000 participants worldwide, and its Biobank currently stores more than 2.5 million biological samples. The network supports the activities of 10,000 on-campus users and more than 400,000 users around the world. Big Data, such as data associated with population genomics, was pushing the existing network to its limits, and PHRI wants to connect its Big Data analysis capabilities to centralized systems that are run by Compute Canada and funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. The network supports all of PHRI’s global sites, so it must provide high availability. In the past, PHRI had outsourced its network and its management. The network was based on Cisco equipment that provided 1GbE connections from closet switches to desktops, redundant 1GbE connections to servers, and 4x10GbE uplinks in the core. PHRI needed to increase the performance and load-balancing capabilities of the network while simplifying management so that it could be performed solely by the inhouse ICT team.