AGC Biologics keeps supply chains moving across global manufacturing operations with network assurance of Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN

AGC Biologics brings the world life-saving treatments for some of the most challenging human medical conditions and diseases, including COVID-19. The company's highly complex and time-sensitive cell growing processes depend on ready access to centrally managed raw materials. Any loss of network connectivity could disrupt access and halt the entire life-critical process.

David Beach, systems architect for AGC Biologics, remarks, "If our facility in Germany loses WAN connectivity, they cannot access inventory or trace samples. With cells growing in a large bioreactor requiring new material added every few hours, the situation could result in a lost batch requiring months to regenerate and costing the company millions of dollars."

Connecting Multinational Manufacturing Operations

One of the largest contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) in the biotechnology industry, AGC Biologics is continually expanding through new acquisitions and opening new facilities around the world.

Each new location brings additional capacity for developing a broader range of biologics (medications) based on mammalian and microbial therapeutic proteins, plasmid (a special DNA molecule within a cell), viral vector delivery methods, and genetically engineered cells. All these development and manufacturing pipelines also make AGC Biologics' WAN critical to its life-saving mission.

A long-time user of Silver Peak WAN optimization, Beach saw SD-WAN as the logical next step to support increasing business demands and turned to Aruba (formerly Silver Peak).

"Latency across our MPLS network and OpenVPN tunnels was slowing down critical processes for our warehouse staff, which negatively impacted our supply chain of raw materials into manufacturing," Beach says. "A key reason for moving to an Aruba SD-WAN was to gain network resilience and traffic optimization along with higher performance from WAN acceleration on one unified, centrally managed platform."

Improves Application Performance, Resilience

Beach and his team deployed the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform at all of AGC Biologics' global locations and implemented the optional Aruba Boost WAN optimization performance pack. The EdgeConnect appliances are also service chained with existing next-generation firewalls at the WAN edge, enabling secure local breakout from each facility.

Many of AGC Biologics' most critical applications are hosted on premises in Seattle, WA, including Microsoft Dynamics for finance and inventory management, and SharePoint for document sharing critical to industry and government regulatory compliance. Other essential applications such as an electronic document management system (EDMS) and laboratory information management system (LIMS) are cloud-based SaaS services.

With the sub-millisecond circuit failover provided by the EdgeConnect platform, business users will no longer lose access to these critical applications due to brownouts or outages on either MPLS or OpenVPN links. Beach reports that the combination of SD-WAN and WAN acceleration is also having a big impact on application performance and staff productivity. "Instead of a minute and a half to download a spreadsheet, it now takes seconds. People aren't just waiting around for a screen refresh."

Life-saving implications

Beach points out that saving seconds and minutes per person on every interaction with a critical system adds up to a lot of valuable time. "When someone in our warehouse tried to pull up inventory, they would often get kicked off the system because the session timed out. That doesn't happen anymore, which provides greater assurance that materials get into manufacturing to meet our production timelines."

Timing is critical for biopharmaceuticals because raw materials and agents must be kept in very specific environmental conditions. Eliminating delays helps keep those component materials in the proper range and usable in production manufacturing.

In some cases, timing can have life-saving implications. For example, AGC Biologics is producing a new COVID-19 vaccine for Novavax in partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to soon immunize the nation's military personnel. Another product, a blood coagulation treatment, must be at hand for patients taking next-generation blood thinners so they stop bleeding if they are involved in an accident.

Significant Time-Saver for Small IT Team

Beach and his team also gain time back in their day, thanks to the ease of centrally managing the SD-WAN through the Aruba Orchestrator management console. "Having visibility into the entire SD-WAN through a single pane of glass makes life so much easier for a small IT department like ours," Beach says.

He adds, "Being able to make changes anywhere across the SD-WAN within a single console is a significant time savings. Instead of hours to set up a device as in the past, we can set up an EdgeConnect appliance in a few minutes. It frees up many hours for us to work on other important projects for the business."

Most important, the Aruba SD-WAN with unified WAN optimization gives Beach confidence that IT can deliver the network services that play such a critical role in supporting AGC Biologics' multinational manufacturing operations. He concludes, "Within IT, it is our job to make sure that everyone has access to the data they need, when they need it. The Aruba SD-WAN helps us live up to that commitment."