Industry leader powers more reliable and flexible network services with Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform

This leading manufacturer offers a broad range of industrial power systems, clean energy solutions, home and garden power equipment, and more. Serving a global market from its manufacturing and business locations across North America, the company’s single-provider MPLS-based Ethernet local area network (ELAN) could no longer support its growth and network reliability requirements.

The company’s manager of global network services explains, “All of our locations connected back to the corporate data center, so if an MPLS circuit went down, we immediately lost connectivity to business applications, communications, internet—everything. With many of our facilities located in rural areas, bringing in a new MPLS circuit could take 90 to 120 days or longer. We needed more network flexibility and reliability.”

Network Uptime More Critical Than Ever

A few years ago, the manufacturer standardized on SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP), which handles all customer order processing, supply chain logistics, billing, etc. The company also relies on a variety of cloud services for things like data analytics, backup, service monitoring, and credit card payment processing.

Everything is digital today, which the global network services manager says makes network uptime more important than ever. “Before, if we had an outage, people could get by processing things manually until the network came back up. That’s no longer an option.”

Business cycles have changed, too, as the company has expanded its product lines. “We used to see business spike during winter storm season and hurricane season when people rush out to buy generators. But now we’re busy year-round. Network outages have a much more negative impact on our business than they did in the past.”

Simplifying WAN Management is Key

The global network services manager and his team considered adding a second MPLS provider, but that would still require the remote facilities to backhaul through the corporate data center for internet access. That’s when they looked into SD-WAN, considering vendors such as Silver Peak, now Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, and Cisco Viptela.

“My priorities were simplicity of deployment and operation, having visibility into application traffic, and being able to easily troubleshoot circuit issues,” the manager says. “After doing our due diligence, we found Aruba best met those qualifications.”

To validate the selection, the network services team set up a test environment, deploying an Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge appliance at one of the company’s regional facilities and another in the corporate data center. Coincidentally, while conducting the evaluation the company’s ELAN provider experienced a 92-hour circuit outage, but the facility staff were able to continue business as usual with no network disruption. The team needed no further proof—EdgeConnect was the right choice.

Enables Secure Local Breakout

Today, the manufacturer has deployed dual redundant EdgeConnect platforms for high availability across all its physical locations, as well as virtual EdgeConnect appliances in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. EdgeConnect is terminated with an MPLS circuit bonded with a dedicated internet access (DIA) link from a second provider. As a result, facilities can use both connections simultaneously and benefit from sub-millisecond failover, allowing staff to remain productive even if one circuit experiences a brownout or outage.

EdgeConnect automatically identifies and steers traffic to Zscaler Internet Access, using primary and secondary tunnels configured with the Aruba Orchestrator management console. Now all traffic destined for cloud applications or the internet is routed to Zscaler for inspection. A senior global network analyst with the company says, “Since we automated tunnel configuration in Orchestrator, our facilities can now break out traffic locally to the internet instead of backhauling everything to our data center.”

The analyst advises that next on his agenda is implementing the advanced security features of the zone-based stateful firewall unified on the EdgeConnect platform.

Flexible options on a unified edge platform

The network services team takes advantage of a wide range of SD-WAN technical capabilities available on the EdgeConnect platform, including path conditioning, dynamic path control, and routing interoperability, which allowed the team to retire legacy routers. The network services manager remarks, “Consolidating on EdgeConnect means we have less equipment to maintain, patch, update, and manage, which helps offset our overall network costs.”

The manager also values having the option to deploy Aruba Boost WAN optimization software where and when it’s needed. As an example, the company will soon be testing its disaster recovery capabilities, which will require moving large volumes of data across the network to a remote site. He notes, “I like being able to buy just a one-month Boost license for when we have that initial data push without making a multi-year commitment. Any time we have a project where we need to move a lot of data, I know Boost is available to us to accelerate the project.”

Brings New Locations Online Faster

The company keeps expanding its business, most recently with a new manufacturing, assembly and distribution operation—the first site where the company will also introduce Aruba wireless access and Aruba ClearPass network access control alongside the EdgeConnect SD-WAN. Moreover, SD-WAN will enable the network services team to accelerate bringing this and other new sites online while streamlining network management.

“Through Orchestrator I can see the utilization of each circuit in real time and if anyone has issues connecting to applications,” the network services manager says. “With more visibility and control, I have less concerns about over-subscribing a service and will ultimately be able to reduce our dependence on MPLS by relying more on DIA and broadband.”

The manager also points out that steering away from MPLS will help when adding new sites. “With EdgeConnect and Orchestrator we can simply fire up two internet circuits and have a site online in less than a week rather than wait months for MPLS. SD-WAN gives us a lot more flexibility to choose providers as the company continues to grow.”