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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rackspace, a leading managed-cloud company, was facing the challenge of upgrading its SAN infrastructure to better utilize physical facilities, keep pace with growing customer demand, and minimize data center and management complexity. The company's data centers had to handle high data volumes with high performance and zero downtime, as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. However, the existing architecture required servers and storage to be located in the same area of a data center, leading to unbalanced growth and islands of unused storage and SAN ports. Rackspace wanted to simplify the architecture so that switches, hosts, or storage platforms could be plugged in anywhere, regardless of their physical locations. At the same time, this new architecture had to be able to scale virtual workloads quickly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Spanish bank, a leader in European banking for over 50 years, recognized the need to adapt to the mobile lifestyle of its customers. Spain has one of the highest levels of mobile penetration in Europe, with smartphone owners making up over 55% of the national population. This trend led the bank to release a personal banking app. However, the initial app received lower user ratings than expected. The bank had a variety of user personas to contend with. Although an impressive 50% of its customers had adopted mobile, the remainder were still banking on their computers via a web browser. The mobile development and customer team needed better end user intelligence so they could easily understand how to enrich the mobile experience to help it achieve parity with – or even surpass – the web experience. The team also needed a solution that would help them maintain the stringent security measures that banking requires.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Einhell, a leading wholesale supplier of tools and garden products, has been focused on expanding the company internationally since 2002. To provide clients around the globe with optimum service, Einhell needed its new international facilities to operate at the same level as its corporate headquarters. This resulted in the need for a robust and agile IT infrastructure that could meet the company’s growing global demands. As part of its expansion effort, Einhell laid the foundation for an IT system operated from a shared service center based in Landau. The company operates three data centers, two main data centers, and one backup facility. Until recently, their function was to supply services for Einhell in order to relieve pressure from the daily IT business and simultaneously promote homogeneous international IT standards. Today, nearly all of these services are virtualized and therefore require a high-performance infrastructure.

Neos Airlines, based in Milan, Italy, operates flights throughout southern Europe and the world. With 150 employees at its Milan headquarters, and an additional 50 people on 24-hour rotation at Malpensa International Airport, the airline must ensure that all of its staff can readily access mission critical applications. From access to enterprise applications such as e-mail, to applications that enable crews to track airplanes and maintenance teams to inventory and manage spare parts, Neos Airlines employees need to be as mobile as the planes they are operating. The financial impact associated with late plane departures or delays in maintenance can be significant, with downtime costing up to $15,000 per hour for each aircraft in the fleet. Because Neos Airlines’ network supports access to the spare parts database, e-mail, aircraft movements, and Internet access for field engineers, network uptime is essential to both daily operations and the bottom line.

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.

The retailer offers a variety of mobile apps for both customers and employees. Customers use these mobile apps to access news, make purchases, and become ambassadors of the brand. Employees use mobile apps to access inventory and shipment information, and implement point-of-sale transactions. In short, mobile apps are helping the retailer streamline operations, improve profitability, and provide better customer service. In order to deliver on a diverse set of applications with a relatively small in-house mobile group, the retailer adopted modern software development techniques such as Agile, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery. However, the team still faced fundamental operational issues, such as understanding overall app stability, viewing network diagnostics, and conducting root cause analysis of crashes. In earlier versions of the mobile app, customers commonly ran into stability issues. These problems led to bad reviews, which naturally suppressed the number of app downloads. Making a great first impression is particularly important in retail as transactions are intimately tied with mobile app usage. If a shopper opens an app for the first time and experiences an error, it is highly likely that he will never use it again. On the internal, employee-facing side, flaws with pilot projects took up to two weeks to identify and correct. Furthermore, the retailer was often left in the dark, relying on anecdotal evidence from store associates. Since field personnel are not trained software testers, they were unable to provide sufficient information to assist the IT team in identifying the sources of these problems.

Peloton, a company that offers high-energy group fitness products, had to completely re-invent fitness equipment to deliver a stellar product. Their Internet-of-Things inspired experience consists of a cutting-edge carbon steel bike with a near-silent belt drive and magnetic resistance flywheel, combined with sensors for a smooth, motivating, fun ride. The bike is equipped with an integrated sweat-resistant console that can link to heart rate monitors and wireless speakers. The console tracks calories burned, cadence, and power output. Peloton also offers live-streaming and on-demand classes with music from some of the best indoor cycling instructors broadcast directly to the Peloton bike. Riders can track progress and motivate friends before, after, or during class with a leaderboard. Additionally, instructors monitor live statistics to help motivate you during the class. To offer the most effective workouts in the world, Peloton must ensure the experience of their IoT bike is fast and flawless. Peloton requires proactive insight into the customer’s experience, making sure not to react to support calls with minimal context.

QxMD, a company that creates high-quality, point-of-care tools for healthcare professionals, was facing challenges in optimizing the performance of its mobile apps. These apps, which are used by over 568,000 physicians and 1,279,000 healthcare professionals worldwide, assist doctors by simplifying the use of clinical prediction models at the bedside and improving access to critical information. However, the company was struggling to ensure flawless performance, which is of utmost importance given the critical nature of the apps' functions. The team had tried Google Analytics and iTunes’ monitoring tools but found that these did not provide the actionable diagnostics and information necessary to optimize performance.

Smule, a San Francisco-based company, offers apps that allow users to sing karaoke, play guitar and piano, rap, and more through their smartphone interface. They also feature a global social network so that users can share their musical performances with friends. Smule’s flagship apps are free to download and use; fans pay for subscription access to its extensive music catalog. Over 300 million people around the globe have used Smule to create, share, discover, and enjoy music. Users post more than 12 million songs and performances each day. However, supporting around 30 million active users a month across all seven continents, and a variety of devices and operating systems comes with its challenges. It vastly multiplied the challenges that come with supporting high-traffic apps on multiple platforms, carriers, and software versions. Pressure was compounded by the nature of the music app industry. Smule was very well aware that with the bevy of music sharing and making platforms on the market, only the best survive. They needed a suite of highly stable, crash-free apps that also met customers’ high expectations for uptime, sound quality, and easy usability. Without additional diagnostic or troubleshooting information, the job of debugging and resolving customer issues was a laborious process. These time-consuming detours took up precious engineering energies that would be better spent developing new features.

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.