Retailer Finds Peplink’s Branch Networking Connectivity a Perfect Fit

Retailer Finds Peplink’s Branch Networking Connectivity a Perfect Fit

Retail | Branch Edge Connectivity

With more and more enterprises building up their business in the digital age, the network they operate in becomes crucial. This often calls for the replacement of MPLS-based networks with more modern, flexible, and scalable SD-WAN solutions. One real-life case of this takes place in Europe, within a world-renowned Italian luxury women’s footwear retailer.

Branch Internet Getting Cold Feet

The Italian shoe retailer faced a lot of limitations with their MPLS network. Although this current setup met their data center and office needs, their other sites were constrained with bandwidth and internet availability. This led to unreliable and inconsistent connectivity.

Each of the retailer’s branches as well as production sites also relied heavily on a single fiber carrier. This further limited the WAN’s resiliency and proved to have insufficient transmitting power. Additionally, not only were operating costs of MPLS expensive, but the slow performance of their telecommunications network brought on excessive costs.

The Need to Step Up

With their current setup not performing to standard, they drafted their objectives for a new connectivity solution. Instead of simply replacing their existing technologies, they planned to transition to a more flexible SD-WAN architecture. The aim of this is to build resiliency within the network at core sites, while allowing data to flow from branch to branch at a reasonable cost.

Peplink Partner Thinking on Their Feet

The European shoe retailer turned to one of Peplink’s partners. They came up with an SD-WAN strategy using Peplink’s Balance series, reliable and flexible enough to meet the retailer’s requirements. The deployment was split into three phases: core MPLS replacement, global MPLS replacement, and global retail connectivity.

Balance 580s, Balance 710s, and Balance 380s were installed in the headquarters and factories, data centers, and offices respectively. In the retail stores, Balance 20s and Balance 30 LTEs were deployed. Furthermore, two separate FusionHubs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) were established between the physical data centers, and the offices and retail branches.

On top of these, SpeedFusion technology was added to the solution to aggregate multiple links, even if they were from different providers. For reliability, redundancy was created by implementing additional fiber lines at sites.

Retailer Getting Their Feet Wet with the New Solution

Thanks to the efforts of Peplink’s partner, the retailer achieved a flexible setup for their enterprise. Their new network applied load balancing to distribute the workload across servers. Using SpeedFusion’s Hot Failover on all available links, the retailer achieved uninterrupted VoIP sessions and unbreakable VPNs 24/7.

As a result, the retailer’s network costs were reduced by 30%. Additionally, this solution improved bandwidth in all locations, with a minimum connection of 10Mbs in stores, and 50Mbs for offices. The latency was also reduced to a range between 20ms and 200ms.

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