A network outage brings business to a screeching halt, especially when there’s no resiliency to help a company prevent losing access to critical apps. Fortunately, such outages are history for a national commercial heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) provider; MicroAge devised a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solution that eliminated downtime. The VeloCloud SD-WAN solution also increased quality of voice and video traffic, improved security and lowered costs.
The SD-WAN technology was perfect for the HVAC provider’s 13 locations and 800 employees. Because more companies are relying on cloud-based apps, multiple paths to the internet are necessary so data automatically fails over when there is a problem. SD-WAN offers more resiliency, which allows the company’s IT department to focus on revenue-generating projects instead of troubleshooting the WAN.
Focused on improving the user experience, MicroAge Account Executive Daniel Archer selected VeloCloud Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN. It uses all network transports simultaneously to achieve dynamic multipath optimization, one of the reasons it won the Best of VMworld 2016 award.
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VeloCloud’s hybrid WAN solution is perfect for companies looking for intelligent, application-based routing. A blended fiber and cable design combines the reliability of fiber with the low cost, high bandwidth that cable offers, giving companies the benefits of both connections and carrier independence.
Moreover, VeloCloud Dynamic Multipath Optimization (DPMO) performs application steering to move voice and other critical application packets across either connection to avoid or mitigate network degradation. “The HVAC provider needed a fully meshed IPSEC overlay that traverses any WAN topology or link,” says Mike Kalas, southwest regional sales manager for VeloCloud. “VeloCloud SD-WAN combines the economics and flexibility of the hybrid WAN with the deployment speed and low maintenance of cloud-based services along with delivering high performance, quality and reliability for applications. It dramatically simplifies the branch by delivering virtualized services from the cloud to branch offices and mobile users everywhere.”
Intrigued by VeloCloud’s ability to augment or replace multilprotocol label switching (MPLS) and replace with any internet connection—which provides comparable or better quality of experience and adds 256-bit encryption for better privacy and security—the HVAC provider put it to a head-to-head proof of concept test against two other products.
“After doing their research, they absolutely loved MicroAge’s VeloCloud SD-WAN solution and chose to go with it,” says Daniel. “In addition to cost savings from dropping MPLS, the IT management team particularly appreciated having more control of the network, not to mention having greater visibility into cloud and on-premises traffic and where bandwidth is used, which allows them to route traffic based on applications.”
“Ease of use and the visibility provided by the VeloCloud Orchestrator was an especially attractive feature,” says Kalas. “Likewise, they were impressed with our distributed system of VeloCloud Gateways that give them a seamless extension to their environment within Azure in addition to SaaS services.”
MicroAge Professional Services implemented the VeloCloud SD-WAN solution and continues to provide support. From start to finish, the project was a resounding success. “MicroAge dug into what the HVAC provider was really trying to accomplish to achieve their business objectives,” says Kalas. “VeloCloud is impressed with the consultative approach Daniel took to providing a full network solution that has given their client so much more than it realized was possible.”
VeloCloud’s disruptive technology is displacing legacy network architecture, changing the way companies are approaching their wide area networks and cloud network architecture.
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Build a better user experience. Let MicroAge accelerate your SD-WAN and network architecture for today’s modern IT environment. Call 800-544-8877 to talk to an expert today.
