SolarWinds enhances collaboration worldwide and saves a half-million dollars with Aruba EdgeConnect
Customer Profile
A global provider of simple, powerful, and secure IT management software, SolarWinds gives organizations the power to accelerate business transformation in today’s hybrid IT environments. Austin, Texas-based, company serves customers in 190 countries, including 498 enterprises on the Fortune 500.- Vertical: Technology Services
- Location: Austin, Texas, United States
- Customer size: Over 2,300 employees in 20 locations worldwide
Use Case
Elevate VoIP quality and accelerate application performance for global development teams by modernizing branch networking with an innovative, automated SD-WAN platform
Requirements
- Modernize branch networking by adopting an SD-WAN optimization platform
- Deploy a high-performance, reliable, future-ready solution for superior experiences
- Include automation capabilities with intelligent, centralized tool sets
Outcomes
- Delivers exceptional video and voice collaborations by reducing jitter 100% and improving VoIP quality up to 12%, significantly enhancing user experiences
- Speeds data transfers and boosts productivity by compressing data up to 98% while improving network reliability with automated fail overs
- Saves more than $500,000 on operational costs over three years and delivers exceptional future-ready network intelligence
With its development teams experiencing significant productivity drains caused by a legacy WAN infrastructure, SolarWinds needed to modernize.
“We had worked to address connectivity challenges by upgrading circuits and building in network redundancy,” explains Charles Pierce, IT Manager. “But we were still missing the network intelligence to optimize performance and service quality.”
Aruba Provides an Advanced, Unified SD-WAN platform
As a leading global provider of IT management software, SolarWinds gives organizations of all sizes and types the power to accelerate business transformation in today’s hybrid IT environments. Trusted by over 300,000 customers in 190 countries, SolarWinds focuses on users and is committed to excellence.
Delivering on its business promises requires SolarWinds to supply over 2,300 employees, spread across 20 locations worldwide, with high-performance applications and stable communications tools for smooth collaboration. To do so, SolarWinds determined it needed to replace its legacy WAN with a modern software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solution.
After evaluating numerous options, including Riverbed, Cisco Viptela, and Aryaka, SolarWinds selected Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN, the self-driving SD-WAN platform by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company. “Compared to the others, Aruba had greater market longevity and offered a solution that was easy to implement and manage,” Pierce says. “Plus, EdgeConnect had WAN optimization available as part of a complete unified platform.”
Modern Solution Accelerates Applications, Lowers Costs
In addition to the native networking capabilities within the EdgeConnect platform, SolarWinds is utilizing Aruba Orchestrator, for centralized SD-WAN management, and Aruba Boost WAN Optimization, for accelerating applications and maximizing available bandwidth.
Adopting EdgeConnect enabled SolarWinds to eliminate legacy WAN hardware, along with the associated complexity and significant management overhead. The company also moved away from MPLS circuits, which are expensive, require months to deploy, inhibit adopting cloud solutions, and can include security concerns.
SD-WAN up to 70% faster to deploy
Using Orchestrator to streamline deployment, SolarWinds standardized the process of rolling out new sites by combining EdgeConnect with dedicated internet access (DIA) circuits. This slashes the time to acquire a circuit from at least three months with MPLS to under 30 days with DIA, a 70% reduction at minimum.
Once a circuit is acquired, EdgeConnect’s automation capabilities reduce the configuration process from hours of manual tasks to just a few clicks. “It’s easy to plug a few cables into EdgeConnect and push out a standard configuration template from Orchestrator,” says Michael Bishop, Senior Network Engineer. “A new site can be up and running within about 30 minutes.”
Innovative Tools Optimize Applications and Operations
To improve application performance and network stability, SolarWinds relies on EdgeConnect’s many innovative features. These include forward error correction, path conditioning, quality of service (QoS) and dynamic path control.
Orchestrator prioritizes traffic to eliminate bottlenecks
Another management plus is Orchestrator’s policy-based business intent overlay. In a nutshell, the overlays automatically prioritize traffic to eliminate bottlenecks and optimize the requirements of every application, which enhances user experiences and productivity.
“Applications no longer fight each other for bandwidth,” Pierce says. “EdgeConnect sorts and prioritizes the traffic before sending it down the best SD-WAN path to meet the business need.”
Accelerating data traffic with Boost
SolarWinds also appreciates the contributions Boost makes to application performance, such as when remote development teams access the Microsoft SQL Server data required for engineering their company’s marquee products. With Boost, SolarWinds is ensuring developers can work efficiently by revving performance with data compression of up to 98%.
“Boost made a vast improvement in the speed of large file transfers between labs and engineering teams,” Bishop says. “File transfers went from taking a long time and a lot of bandwidth to just blazing fast.”
Enhanced business continuity alleviates disruptions
Resiliency and business continuity are also enhanced by EdgeConnect. As SolarWinds has standardized on dual DIA circuits from different telecommunications providers, it can depend on EdgeConnect to automatically manage any outage challenges to keep business operations running seamlessly.
“We no longer have to manually intervene to fail over,” Bishop says. “If there is a brownout on one of the links, or even if one of our service providers goes down completely, we know EdgeConnect is handling it.”
Improving Collaboration, Enabling SASE and Saving $500K
Overall, SolarWinds has realized multiple performance and continuity rewards from its new SD-WAN, all leading to considerable experience and productivity gains while substantially reducing IT overhead. Adopting EdgeConnect also supports SolarWinds continued digital transformation to using cloud-based SaaS applications and PaaS solutions.
From a user perspective, enhancements include reducing jitter, a key contributor to degraded video, from 50 milliseconds to nearly zero, delivering far superior web conferencing. VoIP quality also improved up to 12%, enabling crystal clear voice calls.
Benefits to the company’s bottom line have also been tremendous. In addition to productivity enhancements, SolarWinds estimates it’s saving more than $500,000 in operating expenses over a three-year period.
It all adds up to a reliable, high-performance, future-proof environment that forms the basis for a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture and exceptional collaboration support. “EdgeConnect keeps our application traffic flowing and prioritized,” Pierce says. “There’s peace of mind in that.”
Customer Profile
A global provider of simple, powerful, and secure IT management software, SolarWinds gives organizations the power to accelerate business transformation in today’s hybrid IT environments. Austin, Texas-based, company serves customers in 190 countries, including 498 enterprises on the Fortune 500.- Vertical: Technology Services
- Location: Austin, Texas, United States
- Customer size: Over 2,300 employees in 20 locations worldwide
Use Case
Elevate VoIP quality and accelerate application performance for global development teams by modernizing branch networking with an innovative, automated SD-WAN platform
Requirements
- Modernize branch networking by adopting an SD-WAN optimization platform
- Deploy a high-performance, reliable, future-ready solution for superior experiences
- Include automation capabilities with intelligent, centralized tool sets
Outcomes
- Delivers exceptional video and voice collaborations by reducing jitter 100% and improving VoIP quality up to 12%, significantly enhancing user experiences
- Speeds data transfers and boosts productivity by compressing data up to 98% while improving network reliability with automated fail overs
- Saves more than $500,000 on operational costs over three years and delivers exceptional future-ready network intelligence
With its development teams experiencing significant productivity drains caused by a legacy WAN infrastructure, SolarWinds needed to modernize.
“We had worked to address connectivity challenges by upgrading circuits and building in network redundancy,” explains Charles Pierce, IT Manager. “But we were still missing the network intelligence to optimize performance and service quality.”
Aruba Provides an Advanced, Unified SD-WAN platform
As a leading global provider of IT management software, SolarWinds gives organizations of all sizes and types the power to accelerate business transformation in today’s hybrid IT environments. Trusted by over 300,000 customers in 190 countries, SolarWinds focuses on users and is committed to excellence.
Delivering on its business promises requires SolarWinds to supply over 2,300 employees, spread across 20 locations worldwide, with high-performance applications and stable communications tools for smooth collaboration. To do so, SolarWinds determined it needed to replace its legacy WAN with a modern software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solution.
After evaluating numerous options, including Riverbed, Cisco Viptela, and Aryaka, SolarWinds selected Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN, the self-driving SD-WAN platform by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company. “Compared to the others, Aruba had greater market longevity and offered a solution that was easy to implement and manage,” Pierce says. “Plus, EdgeConnect had WAN optimization available as part of a complete unified platform.”
Modern Solution Accelerates Applications, Lowers Costs
In addition to the native networking capabilities within the EdgeConnect platform, SolarWinds is utilizing Aruba Orchestrator, for centralized SD-WAN management, and Aruba Boost WAN Optimization, for accelerating applications and maximizing available bandwidth.
Adopting EdgeConnect enabled SolarWinds to eliminate legacy WAN hardware, along with the associated complexity and significant management overhead. The company also moved away from MPLS circuits, which are expensive, require months to deploy, inhibit adopting cloud solutions, and can include security concerns.
SD-WAN up to 70% faster to deploy
Using Orchestrator to streamline deployment, SolarWinds standardized the process of rolling out new sites by combining EdgeConnect with dedicated internet access (DIA) circuits. This slashes the time to acquire a circuit from at least three months with MPLS to under 30 days with DIA, a 70% reduction at minimum.
Once a circuit is acquired, EdgeConnect’s automation capabilities reduce the configuration process from hours of manual tasks to just a few clicks. “It’s easy to plug a few cables into EdgeConnect and push out a standard configuration template from Orchestrator,” says Michael Bishop, Senior Network Engineer. “A new site can be up and running within about 30 minutes.”
Innovative Tools Optimize Applications and Operations
To improve application performance and network stability, SolarWinds relies on EdgeConnect’s many innovative features. These include forward error correction, path conditioning, quality of service (QoS) and dynamic path control.
Orchestrator prioritizes traffic to eliminate bottlenecks
Another management plus is Orchestrator’s policy-based business intent overlay. In a nutshell, the overlays automatically prioritize traffic to eliminate bottlenecks and optimize the requirements of every application, which enhances user experiences and productivity.
“Applications no longer fight each other for bandwidth,” Pierce says. “EdgeConnect sorts and prioritizes the traffic before sending it down the best SD-WAN path to meet the business need.”
Accelerating data traffic with Boost
SolarWinds also appreciates the contributions Boost makes to application performance, such as when remote development teams access the Microsoft SQL Server data required for engineering their company’s marquee products. With Boost, SolarWinds is ensuring developers can work efficiently by revving performance with data compression of up to 98%.
“Boost made a vast improvement in the speed of large file transfers between labs and engineering teams,” Bishop says. “File transfers went from taking a long time and a lot of bandwidth to just blazing fast.”
Enhanced business continuity alleviates disruptions
Resiliency and business continuity are also enhanced by EdgeConnect. As SolarWinds has standardized on dual DIA circuits from different telecommunications providers, it can depend on EdgeConnect to automatically manage any outage challenges to keep business operations running seamlessly.
“We no longer have to manually intervene to fail over,” Bishop says. “If there is a brownout on one of the links, or even if one of our service providers goes down completely, we know EdgeConnect is handling it.”
Improving Collaboration, Enabling SASE and Saving $500K
Overall, SolarWinds has realized multiple performance and continuity rewards from its new SD-WAN, all leading to considerable experience and productivity gains while substantially reducing IT overhead. Adopting EdgeConnect also supports SolarWinds continued digital transformation to using cloud-based SaaS applications and PaaS solutions.
From a user perspective, enhancements include reducing jitter, a key contributor to degraded video, from 50 milliseconds to nearly zero, delivering far superior web conferencing. VoIP quality also improved up to 12%, enabling crystal clear voice calls.
Benefits to the company’s bottom line have also been tremendous. In addition to productivity enhancements, SolarWinds estimates it’s saving more than $500,000 in operating expenses over a three-year period.
It all adds up to a reliable, high-performance, future-proof environment that forms the basis for a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture and exceptional collaboration support. “EdgeConnect keeps our application traffic flowing and prioritized,” Pierce says. “There’s peace of mind in that.”