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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

NIKKEI, a leading publisher of business information in Japan, was facing challenges with its storage infrastructure. The company had three separate Storage Area Networks (SANs) for its three core business divisions, each with its own IT staff, budget, and storage devices. This resulted in duplicated management tasks and hardware expenditures. The company realized that consolidating its SANs would streamline administration, enhance IT productivity, and minimize future investments in storage hardware. Additionally, the company was seeking ways to further protect its mission-critical data by implementing a disaster recovery site in Osaka, Japan. However, it wanted to avoid the cost and complexity of separately linking each SAN island to this facility. It believed a single, enterprise-wide connection would be much more economical and practical.

Evangeline Parish School District, serving approximately 6000 students in 12 schools in rural Louisiana, was faced with the challenge of upgrading its network to support upcoming computer-based Common Core testing requirements. The district’s network infrastructure, including the cabling, was outdated, leading to frequent speed, connectivity, and latency problems with both the wired and wireless networks. This resulted in poor application performance and switches dropping users when network traffic peaked. The district also faced issues with aging Cisco wireless equipment, which relied on Power over Ethernet (PoE) injectors, deployed in the ceiling near each access point. The injectors generated heat, which in turn affected the access points and made them unreliable. When problems arose, an IT team member would have to drop everything and drive out to the school, which might be 40 miles away, resulting in lost teaching time.

The University of New Mexico (UNM) is the state’s flagship research institution, injecting millions of dollars into New Mexico’s economy, advancing health care, and augmenting teaching and learning across the state. The university community expects IT to be agile—able to quickly meet new demands and innovate services, whether on campus or in the cloud. However, UNM’s existing network had reached its capacity limits. The IT team had the option of upgrading the line cards and management modules to add capacity. But they decided to look at something new, as financial accountability is critical for them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Remind101 is an educational technology provider that offers a communication tool for teachers, students, and parents. The service is used by over 600,000 teachers in the United States to send millions of messages every month to over ten million students and parents. The Remind101 team measures their success in terms of user acquisition and messages sent per teacher. To drive adoption of the service, Remind101 users must find the app experience to be simple, fast, and predictably stable. If the mobile app crashes or lags, user acceptance will suffer. When issues do arise, Remind101’s target audience is not likely to be able to provide much assistance regarding the source of these problems. Without additional diagnostic or troubleshooting information, the job of debugging and resolving these flaws is a laborious, error-prone process for Remind101’s team. These time-consuming detours waste precious engineering energies that should be spent developing new features.

Azul Airlines, a startup launched in 2008, has been disrupting the classic airline model by offering frequent flights to over 100 destinations in Brazil, French Guyana, and the United States. As the company grew, it realized the need to bolster the customer experience on the ground. To complement the on-the-go lifestyle, Azul needed to provide a way for their customers to conveniently book, manage, and access reservations – preferably, one that didn’t require them to be chained to a computer, waiting on hold for a customer service agent, or standing in line to check-in for their flight. Building and managing a successful mobile app presented great challenges. With scores of daily flights, Azul is dealing with a host of passengers from different countries, time zones, language groups, and so on. They needed to build an app that could cater to a diverse user pool and scale easily. Crucially, the app also had to provide customers with a convenient way to organize travel plans and seamlessly go from point A to point B. This hinged on the app’s stability and simplicity.

In its quest to deliver a cutting-edge customer experience, the company realized that it was time to prioritize mobile. They had created a basic app, but after discovering the consumer hunger for apps, they knew they could go much bigger. It was time to put their award-winning services, from claim management to policy assistance to benefits review, directly in the hands of their customers. Insurance apps are complicated by nature, because they have both business-to-consumer and business-to-business offerings. Individuals want a straightforward customer experience to check the status of a claim or review their coverage options. If brokers are going to do business via mobile, they need a seamlessly operating app; their livelihood depends on it. For instance, if an app crashes during a policy bid, they could potentially lose out on thousands of dollars. The company needed proper visibility into their mobile offerings to make sure that they could stand alongside its other superior services. To cater to all its customers, the app needed to work on both Android and iOS operating systems. It also needed to be fully functional for both individual and business users.