Manufacturer transitions from MPLS to internet

“With a Silver Peak overlay across our WAN, we were able to connect our offices without a lot of work,” said Giuseppe Genovesi, head of corporate IT at Interroll. “Since the deployment, Silver Peak has made a huge improvement to our business productivity and we are able to better service our customers, providing them with a much faster, leaner and more customised approach. The internet has opened up many doors for our company, and without Silver Peak that would not have been that easy.”
As a global manufacturing company, Interroll runs an MPLS network connecting 13 production facilities, 18 sales offices, and 1,800 employees across Asia-Pacific, North America, and Europe. Engineers and designers in those locations work closely with customers to design and develop new products. Editing and moving CAD files across the MPLS network was essential to that process.

But as Interroll grew, transferring large design files proved increasingly impractical. Genovesi wanted to centralise Interroll’s application services, including AutoCAD, and work on the improvement of centralised SAP access from far places in private, regional data centres. But that would mean to an estimated 5X increase in MPLS bandwidth and a 30 percent increase in costs.

It was not just the economics that made MPLS unsuitable for Interroll, it was also the complexity. The company had embraced Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), specifically Office 365 incorporating SharePoint Online, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Directing the cloud traffic across the MPLS backbone was impractical, consuming even more MPLS bandwidth and slowing cloud performance. Instead, Genovesi equipped the offices with direct Internet access. Silver Peak is used to prioritise and direct traffic to the internet or MPLS network.

“The network became too complicated,” added Genovesi. “A simple change could take weeks to implement. We needed something far more dynamic.”

Interroll found a more agile way to improve SaaS and CAD performance over the internet with Silver Peak. Several WAN companies were considered, but Silver Peak was selected for its flexibility and performance. Silver Peak’s virtual approach and subscription-based pricing model enabled Interroll to connect its offices via the most cost-effective source of connectivity available without sacrificing performance. And Silver Peak’s unique approach to SaaS optimisation not only improved Office 365 performance, but gave Interroll unprecedented control over their traffic.

“With other vendors, SaaS optimisation is a ‘one size fits all’ solution,” he continued. “Silver Peak lets us determine how our traffic flows so we can, for example, direct our Far East traffic around problematic regions.”

With Silver Peak, Interroll has reshaped how it delivers applications. AutoCAD is going to work as well across the internet as it does within the office. The company’s Visio drawings in SharePoint can be viewed, opened, and edited quickly and easily even as parts of the drawings are retrieved from locations in different regions of the network. Office 365 performance is also significantly improved. All of this accomplished without the increased bandwidth costs expected from legacy MPLS.