Global Home Fashion Retailer Assures Performance of Buyer Applications and Distribution Services in Production & Disaster Recovery Data Centers
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
- Asia
- Europe
Country
- Other
- United States
Product
- InfiniStream appliances
- nGenius Packet Flow Switches
- nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform
- OptiView XG handheld network analysis tablet
Tech Stack
- Network Monitoring
- Disaster Recovery
- Data Center Management
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
- Revenue Growth
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The customer is a global retailer specializing in discount apparel and home fashion. They offer customers a changing assortment of high-quality merchandise at discounted prices. With nearly four thousand stores spanning nine countries on three continents, generating in excess of $30 billion in annual revenues, this truly is a globally distributed business. To protect the business, this retailer maintains active backups sync’d between their primary datacenter and a disaster recovery location. For this home fashion retailer, always-on communication between stores, distribution centers, buying offices, datacenters, and disaster recovery locations, was absolutely crucial for ensuring that the right goods make it to the stores in a timely fashion.
The Challenge
The home fashion retailer faced a challenge in effectively monitoring network uptime and ensuring the delivery of critical voice and data applications and services. Network congestion issues were interfering with application performance in both production and backup data centers. If a buying office or distribution center went offline, the cost to the business was millions of dollars every hour that it was down. The IT team was tasked with monitoring network uptime and ensuring availability of mission-critical applications and services even in failover situations. Network congestion issues and lack of bandwidth, which interfered with application performance, presented a particularly vexing problem for the team. In addition, vitally important voice services were impacted, causing IT to literally pull their hair out trying to identify the root cause of the issues.
The Solution
The retailer deployed the nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology. They instrumented its primary and backup datacenters, distribution centers, and buying offices with InfiniStream appliances, the newest software-based InfiniStreamNG™ appliance, and nGenius Packet Flow Switches, so they can monitor network uptime and availability and quickly pinpoint congestion issues between the stores and distribution centers even in a DR scenario. nGeniusONE dashboards and grid were deployed to investigate issues both reactively and proactively. New dashboards are built ad hoc as problems arise. In addition, an OptiView XG handheld network analysis tablet was deployed to troubleshoot Wi-Fi connectivity issues at critical board of directors meetings. To support business assurance in a DR scenario, IT deployed a standby server in the DR datacenter, running a full instance of nGeniusONE configured as a hot standby for the server in the main datacenter.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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