Printing Firm Dumps MPLS Service

StoneGate Reduces Costs, Boosts Network Performance

Wise Business Forms, a leading print manufacturer, implemented the StoneGate Firewall/VPN solution to easily integrate disparate office connections and significantly improved network performance and security. The deployment enabled Wise to successfully move from a Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) connection to a combination of more cost-effective Internet Service Providers (ISPs). As a result of the superior connectivity, ease of deployment and administration, and security advancements, Wise expects to record a ROI within 16 months.

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Across the Eastern U.S., Wise provides customers with business forms, commercial printing, document services, and marketing services for resale. With clients and employees that work around the clock, Wise depends upon 24x7x365 network uptime and security in order to fulfill the purchase orders that drive corporate profitability.

In order to efficiently manage nationwide printing requests and sustain internal server communications such as email, FTP and file sharing, Wise had been using an MPLS network for communications among eight different office locations and an expanding customer base. However, the company was consistently experiencing stretches of Internet downtime and suffered from very slow Internet download speeds with the four AT&T T-1s feeding MPLS to its Alpahretta, Ga. headquarters. The company desperately needed to eliminate the network failures and increase its network bandwidth allotment to sustain customer satisfaction and further company growth.

When the private company installed a new digital printing application that would boost the bandwidth requirements among its eight locations spread out in six states east of the Mississippi, Picardo started looking for less-expensive options than the $1,400 to $1,800 per month per site that doubling up the 1.5M bps MPLS T-1s would cost. The monthly cost per site of the VPN connections, which double the bandwidth of the T-1s, is about $250, he said -- less than he was paying for the MPLS service.

A Wise Move

After seeking counsel from Perket Technologies, a certified Stonesoft partner, Wise discontinued the use of the MPLS service and deployed a combination of “clustered” DSL, cable modems and wireless cards to enhance corporate network connections. In preparation for the new infrastructure, Wise also sought to purchase network security solutions that would integrate the disparate networks and ensure high availability with increased bandwidth. Wise worked with Perket and determined that the StoneGate FW-1020e and StoneGate SG-500 appliances, with the company´s patented Multi-Link™ technology built in, were ideal.

By utilizing multiple parallel ISP connections simultaneously, the StoneGate solution secured both the availability and integrity of the office-to-office connections. The Internet download speed was on average four to six times faster, enabling Wise to provide more efficient customer service. The user-friendly StoneGate Management Center made it easy for Wise to operate a flawless data center relocation process that they couldn’t have done without the automatic failover and bandwidth capacities of the StoneGate solution. Additionally, the deep packet inspection capabilities in the StoneGate firewalls enabled Wise to immediately thwart all malicious network attacks.

One of the more time-consuming jobs of the transition was lining up the DSL and cable services. Because of the wide dispersion of the sites and the mix of access technologies, Picardo had to contract for WAN services with nine separate providers.

Now that all the lines are in, that number of providers doesn't create extra work. If a line fails, he makes a call to the provider of that line; he'd have to make such a call even if there were just one provider. So far, the only outages the VPN has experienced were due to problems inside the providers' networks, not on the last-mile access lines to Wise sites, explained Picardo.

Bandwidth the cable and DSL links provide is ample, and when one line has failed, the StoneGate appliances have diverted all traffic to the second connection.

At the same time, Wise moved its data center from its headquarters office to a collocation site to avoid issues the company had been having with losing power for so long at the data center that its UPS would run out of juice. Unlike the corporate sites, the data center is connected to the Internet via a 7M bps connection that can burst to 10M bps to handle peak traffic. That way at peak times when corporate sites are each sending heavy traffic, the connection to the data center doesn't become a choke point.

One downside of cobbling together DSL connections is that the available speeds vary due to the quality of copper lines and the distance between the corporate sites and the providers' central offices. The worst case for Wise is at its headquarters, where the maximum upstream DSL speed it can get is 512K bps, which is inadequate in times of high use, said Picardo. As a stopgap he installed two DSL lines to give an aggregate of 1M bps. Cable service in the area was prohibitively expensive because the provider would have to extend its network at Wise's expense.

“It was very time consuming and expensive for Wise to maintain Internet uptime without centralized network integration or traffic monitoring capabilities. The connection disruptions and bandwidth limitations were severely threatening our ability to conduct business in a timely manner. With the StoneGate solution in place, our connection speed has dramatically increased and that has led to better overall productivity and customer satisfaction.”

Marc Picardo – Director of Information Technologies – Wise

Positioned for Long-term Optimized Network Performance

Longer term, Picardo is looking into replacing the dual DSL connections with a T-1 Internet connection, which would have stricter service quality guarantees. Since most of the traffic from the headquarters site goes to the collocation facility where the data center now resides, he is also considering adding WAN acceleration gear at headquarters and at the data center to boost throughput.

On the upside, the new architecture gives each site direct access to the Internet. Before, if a remote site wanted to reach the Internet, the traffic had to go over the MPLS network to the lone Wise Internet connection in Alpharetta, routing that introduced unbearable delays, said Picardo. "Before, you didn't want to get on the Internet. It was pointless." Now the links are responsive and are used freely.

In shifting to the StoneGate firewalls, Wise also got rid of its Cisco and Adtran WAN routers because the firewalls handle all the VPN routing necessary. "It's not a true router, but it does what we need," said Picardo. “The transition from MPLS went smoothly. "We moved from MPLS to Stonesoft and moved the data center all in one weekend and there were no WAN issues Monday morning."

Despite abandoning MPLS for his data network, Picardo said he's ready to go back to the technology to support a corporate VoIP network that will replace an expensive Centrex service. The new Verizon T-1 MPLS links will fully mesh the eight sites and plug in via IP to Verizon's network, which will handle interfacing with the public phone network. When the MPLS network has free bandwidth, it can also carry data site-to-site to supplement the DSL and cable VPN connections. All that for less per month than Wise had been paying for just MPLS data.

Wise Business Forms Challenges

Poor network reliability
Expensive connection costs
Greater bandwidth requirements
Managing multiple vendors

Results with Stonesoft

Significantly enhanced network performance
Dramatically reduced connection costs
Easy migration and ongoing management
Improved productivity and customer satisfaction

About Stonesoft

Stonesoft Corporation (NASDAQ OMX: SFT1V) delivers proven, innovative solutions that simplify network security management for even the most complex network environments. The StoneGate Platform unifies management of entire networks - including StoneGate and third-party devices – blending integrated threat management, end-to-end high availability and network optimization into a centrally controlled system. As a result, Stonesoft provides the highest levels of proactive control, always-on connectivity and compliance at the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) on the market today. Founded in 1990, the company is an established leader in network security innovation with corporate headquarters in Helsinki, Finland and Americas headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information, visit www.stonesoft.com and http://stoneblog.stonesoft.com.