Broadcom

Carmakers are facing the next wave of automotive connectivity. Cars will extend their reach, tapping our homes, talking to nearby cars and connecting to myriad other devices. New challenge is to meet bandwidth demands.

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.

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.

DeNA offers an impressive portfolio of mobile and online services. It boasts over 1,000 web games and 100 mobile apps developed natively, with many having upwards of 10 million downloads. It has a diverse user base to match, running the gamut from games to e-commerce to entertainment content distribution. DeNA currently mobile apps on several platforms, focusing on Android and iOS. Gaming apps require extremely detailed coding at every level. The user experience, which of course is of the utmost importance, hinges on this. Creating a successful app is one thing, but maintaining that success becomes a huge headache for developers. To DeNA’s dismay, several of their creations received negative reviews in the App Store and Google Play. The feedback was mostly focused around the instability of their mobile apps, which caused many customers to abandon ship. DeNA needed a robust mobile-first solution that was capable of dissecting problems to understand real-time, real-world performance.

The bank wanted to create a mobile experience that would make banking convenient, quick, and compelling for their customers. The mobile banking landscape is a competitive and complicated one, with most institutions offering apps, so they had their work cut out for them. Providing a seamless and stable customer experience was paramount. However, a banking app is a complicated beast. Stringent security measures combined with a complicated technical backbone created a plethora of potential fail points. For instance, “mobile unavailable” messages plagued many customers. Because the bank couldn’t reproduce the app failure notifications, they were unable to diagnose the root cause of the issues. As an institution that always puts the customer first, the bank wanted to understand where failures were happening. To monitor the pulse of current performance and address any issues, the team needed real mobile app intelligence. In addition to standard features like Touch ID or Mobile Check Deposit, they also wanted to be at the cutting edge of the industry and deliver the innovations that customers were clamoring for.

B&H Photo, a major supplier of photo, video, and audio equipment, has been a technology leader in the retail industry, offering online ordering and mobile applications since 2009. However, with the increasing importance of mobile users, the company faced challenges in maintaining the quality and performance of its mobile apps. Customers generally did not report app flaws and crashes, leaving the IT team operating in the dark. Certain key APIs were experiencing slow performance, but the exact cause of these issues was difficult to ascertain. This resulted in increased latency and potentially alienated customers. The company was dedicating crucial development talent to deciphering these app issues, instead of focusing on innovation and new features.

Groupon is focused on ensuring an exceptional mobile user experience through their mobile apps. As such, they must be proactive in managing app performance and user experience. Because of the transparency of app store ratings, it is more important now than ever to delight customers. This is no trivial task, however, as complexity and fragmentation across the mobile ecosystem causes many challenges. Groupon turned to Apteligent for a solution that would delight customers with app quality and user experience.

The hospitality company, with over 4000 hotels worldwide, recognized the need to attract a younger generation of customers, particularly millennials, who are more comfortable with mobile technology. The company's existing app was plagued with stability and performance issues, leading to poor reviews and ratings. The company realized that to deliver excellent customer service to this demographic, they needed to provide a seamless mobile experience. This meant their apps needed to make it easy for customers to find hotels, make reservations, check-in, and more.

Showroomprive, a leader in European e-commerce, faced the challenge of making their mobile experience universally accessible for their customers. They created both iOS and Android native apps, which had to be offered in eight different languages due to their diverse customer base across Europe. However, they quickly realized that mobile is a completely different creature than web, and thus faced the formidable task of understanding this relatively uncharted user experience. The mobile challenge was further complicated by the company's plans to enter new international markets.

News publications are adopting mobile phones and tablets as their primary communication vehicle. Given the transient nature of mobile users and the plethora of news and television app substitutes, however, it is more important now than ever for companies to provide interactive content, improved graphics, and motion-optimized interfaces. With users consuming local news at an alarming rate and location-based services at an inflection point, the time was ripe for Hearst TV to focus on mobile apps to engage with more users and monetize through display ads. Hearst TV brought development in-house and built and deployed over 100 apps for iOS and Android on a variety of devices. Providing accurate, timely news during crisis situations has always been a strength of the company. During the week of the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, for example, app traffic for Hearst TV’s station in Boston, WCVB, spiked 247% and the company seamlessly delivered full coverage of the event.

The company developed a wearable device that connects to the company’s mobile app, allowing businesses to set up and track fitness challenges for their workers. The device can measure daily steps, calories burned, distance covered, and exercise time. This can then be synced to an iOS or Android mobile app that makes it easy to track points and activities. The app is also designed to support activities trackers made by other manufacturers. The app and devices are seen as strategic initiatives because of the necessary consumerization of these solutions. The company’s business succeeds by making recurring revenue from the sponsoring companies. If employees don’t use the solution, the sponsoring companies won’t renew their subscriptions. Because of this, the performance of the app and device is key — the overall user experience must be flawless.