Perfect Network Package for Global Group Connecting a Global Business
The customer offers a broad range of plastic, fibre, metal and glass packaging products, PET containers, plastic and metal closures, along with packaging-related services. They have annual sales of approximately $11 billion, they are in the process of integrating a series of recent acquisitions, and they have factories and offices in four continents. In an increasingly knowledge-driven business, they have chosen to invest in networking technology to harmonise the group companies, drive out economies of scale in their business processes and give Customer a competitive edge in their sector.
"BaseN understands our business processes and network technologies well enough for us to trust and follow their recommendations. BaseN Platform, their core product, is delivering significant results by helping us enhance network performance and save significant amounts of time and money. BaseN Platform tracks and surveys all network elements, from all different angles 24/7, and generates understandable graphics with parameters which are easy to assess and adjust"
- Customer's Infrastructure Manager
Because the customer relies on well-know business-critical applications like SAP to create value globally, it risks losing money every second its network applications don't run correctly. To minimize this risk the customer put together a high capacity global network with in-built redundancy, provided by a selection of leading service suppliers. The network infrastructure was made up of a variety of technologies including ATM, Frame Relay, x.25, IP VPN and MPLS-based VPN, depending on the service suppliers' standards.
A Major Challenge
The customer needed the right tools to survey, optimize and track their various network elements and the various parties responsible for these elements. The overwhelming need for such transparency emerged when one of the service suppliers encountered major difficulties rectifying errors which partially paralysed the customer's network. When the service supplier was unable to diagnose the difficulty it became evident that a basic set of tools to govern the network as well as the service providers themselves was required.
"One of the key reasons we chose BaseN to maintain our data network was their unique ability to pinpoint the source of performance problems"
- Infrastructure Manager
Toward a Solution
The customer's service provider lacked facilities to view all the parameters and network elements and their relationship to each other. To address this the customer looked into off-the-shelf solutions from network management firms other than BaseN. When this approach failed, BaseN's technical consultants were approached and the customer gave the company access to their its devices. The customer soon recognized that, at least on paper, the service delivered by Base Networks could provide them with the right expertise to fix the problem, the chance to optimize their network, and the reassurance that similar problems would not happen again. Progress was being made.
The preliminary diagnosis was done in a matter of hours. One of the customer's network service providers promised three classes of services. However, when bursty best effort traffic clogged up the entire capacity it became clear that the configuration had been incorrectly implemented. The network traffic prioritization needed reconfiguration. In addition, links in the core of the service suppliers network were heavily overbooked, and as a result a lot of packets were being lost when using these links.
Network Management Package
Based on a set of measurements done with the help of the BaseN technical consultant and Service Cycles using the BaseN toolkit, traffic patterns and general network health were quickly determined. For a full diagnosis, only BaseN Platform - BaseN's measurement, monitoring and reporting tool - was able to penetrate the widespread network and isolate the precise problem locations.
"The customer was using tools from different vendors to seek the solution made by BaseN, but they did not come close to the comprehensiveness of BaseN Platform, and they delivered data late. If you have an outage on Monday, little you can do when receiving the reports the following Friday."
Niilo Neuvo, CTO, BaseN
With BaseN Platform coverage implemented across the whole network, the customer's system engineers could continuously probe the complete network infrastructure, peer into third party networks, conduct performance testing from any customer location around the world, and also track and trace applications.
"Our work for this customer proves that we are able to deliver rapid and accurate troubleshooting and quality management for large, complex, multi-technology networks. For industry leaders such as this customer, our ability to ensure and optimize stable data flow and inter-location transfers can save millions in application downtime."
Pasi Hurri, CEO and President BaseN
Tailoring the Package
As part of its solution, BaseN configured its product to keep an eye on the customer's business-critical SAP application. By constantly performing trend analysis and evaluating possible scenarios, harmful outages and faults could be predicted before they happened.
Key Success Factors
+ Ability to view and measure all traffic streams and relationships of network elements
+ Diagnostic insight into service provider's own network and "hidden" configurations
+ Flexibility in determining sample sizes and locations
+ Ability to integrate customer-specific monitoring elements as required.