Carousel partners with a wide range of technology partners so that we can recommend solutions that make the most sense for answering each of our clients’ particular technology needs. As part of our exploration of the SD-WAN marketplace, we selected products and offers most relevant to our customer base and arrived at Viptela as one of those partners.

Long before the Cisco acquisition, Carousel invested in Viptela—a solution our experts knew would bring reliability and potential cost savings to clients. And when it came time to upgrade our own WAN, we went through the same vetting process we do with clients, completing all the necessary due diligence steps.

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Our final decision was to integrate Viptela into our environment. By specifically working with partners that we also recommend to clients, we gain unique perspectives on the value that our technology partners can deliver. This also gives us a better understanding of how our clients can maximize the capabilities of many different technologies.

In the blog that follows, we present how we have recently benefitted from using solutions offered by Viptela. The challenges we faced prior to installation will likely resonate with challenges you have and may need to resolve. Should you deploy this solution, you may reap similar benefits.

Viptela Improves Business Experience and WAN Reliability

After the vetting process and selecting Viptela, the Carousel environment had an immediate need within our own environment to deploy this solution, resulting in an improved user experience, WAN reliability, and best of all—$600K in savings.

We were already firm believers in Cisco’s SD-WAN strategy, and our system engineers are fully-trained on Cisco SD-WAN solutions as well as the professional/managed services and consumption models offered through Viptela and Meraki. Both solution sets fall under our data center offerings and include storage, virtualization, connectivity, and application management. These are the two primary tools we use to help our clients manage datacenter infrastructure and consumption.

The partnership with Viptela came along at a good time. We needed to reduce WAN carrier costs while also improving the end-user experience at our branch offices as it pertains to connectivity reliability and access to applications in our hybrid cloud environment. Our traditional multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) cloud was highly-available, but it ran at a low speed.

Just as we were about to switch to a lower-cost Internet connection—that was likely less reliable—Viptela came up with a much better alternative. They took our existing WAN and modernized it. The SD-WAN solution didn’t change what our end users were doing on the front-end, but it enhanced what was taking place behind the scenes. Viptela allowed us to validate our decision to utilize a dual Internet, software-defined WAN model vs. the traditional single connection MPLS cloud design.

The solution leverages a hot/hot stand-by model where everything runs on one Internet connection—with mere milliseconds of potential impact. Viptela leverages both connections in the hot/hot model by limiting each Internet connection to a configurable utilization level based on demand and type of data prioritizing critical real time traffic needs. The technology also looks downstream to other offices and applications to bring in a whole new level of efficiency that we could never achieved within our traditional MPLS model.

Benefits of the Viptela SD-WAN Solution:

• Rapid and straightforward deployment to accelerate immediate end-user experience and solution reliability
• Increased application speed and network consumption visibility
• Enhanced communications capabilities for sales teams
• $600K cost savings
• 25% reduction in overall carrier costs (after 40% of the total implementation)

As an example of how the Viptela solutions helps us, if the majority of the consumption for a video conference call comes from our Exeter or Windsor office, the Viptela solution looks at connections and decides which one will give us a better experience. It’s all seamless to end users and maximizes the efficiency of what we’ve got. The solution can talk to itself at all branch locations and can mesh out this type of activity and shift on-the-fly routing. Once the second video call starts, it maximizes availability.

As of today, the solution is 40% implemented, and we plan build it out as an enterprise-wide configuration. So far, the results have been in-line with addressing carrier renewals, and the WAN technology has improved the performance of our more challenged locations. We’ve been able to improve our core data center consumption and provide improved connectivity for our branch offices at the network edge. We anticipate completing the project in Q1 2019.

Enabling Your End Users to Do Their Jobs

We hope that our experience with Viptela might prove helpful to your situation as you look to increase the performance of your WAN. This solution plays a key role in enabling your end users to do their jobs by delivering consistent application performance.

To find out more about Viptela and how it can help your business, feel free to contact me at smoody@carouselindustries.com.

• case study, 
• Cisco, 
• SD-WAN, 
• Viptela