Collapsing the stack and centralizing management helps Living Spaces accelerate scaling across the U.S.

Living Spaces is a prominent furniture retailer in the United States. Their store locations include large showrooms, where customers can view furnishings for indoor and outdoor spaces, and plenty of warehouse space for storing on-hand inventory. These locations must serve customers with responsive shopping experiences, which depend on the network infrastructure.

Increasing demand helped Living Spaces grow out of its home state of California, into states including Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and others. Their out-of-band infrastructure was crucial to spinning up new locations and maintaining operations. But they faced a significant problem: this infrastructure was incredibly complex and costly, requiring many dedicated cellular and out-of-band devices at each location. See why their three-person network team needed a solution that could:

• Reduce costs and eliminate the need for $300,000 per year in SIM contracts
• Reduce workloads and risks, by centralizing management and minimizing entry points
• Accelerate deployments by allowing automation

Providing low-level remote access and automation saves hundreds of hours per month for the university’s small IT team

One of the largest universities in the United States fosters academics and research for nearly 40,000 students, staff, and researchers. The university sits among the top 10 schools for engineering, and heavily integrates technology into all disciplines, including engineering, computer sciences, and agricultural studies.

The university received a grant to expand, update, and connect their network of campuses, while enhancing infrastructure and mobility, resiliency, and campus amenities.  But having more than 200 on-campus buildings presents a challenge. The campus is home to academic facilities as well as a hospital, airport, 60,000-seat sports stadium, and dozens of leased spaces for local businesses. This makes the university equivalent to a small city, and its network infrastructure is what keeps it all connected.

Their small IT team was responsible for maintaining more than 10,000 management devices, most of which were long past EOL and frequently failing. They needed a refresh, but with a solution that could also reduce the hundreds of hours they spent every month on travel and on-site work. To maximize their day-to-day efficiency, they required a solution that could overcome these operational gaps:

• Reducing the 100-150 hours of monthly travel times, by giving engineers the ability to fully access their stack remotely
• Reducing the 80-120 hours of monthly on-site work required to maintain the 99.999% SLA, by automating manual jobs such as patching and firmware upgrades
• Expanding their management headroom and use-case adaptability, by migrating to IPv6 and reducing the existing 6RU device stack

Download the full case study to see how ZPE’s Nodegrid hardware and software solved these problems.

Problems and Gaps

The university is one of the largest in the United States. It sits among the nation’s top 50 schools for research expenditures, and heavily integrates technology into all disciplines, including engineering. Its main campus is home to more than 200 buildings that sit on over 2,500 acres of land. The campus is essentially a small city, and the university’s network infrastructure keeps it all connected.

This network infrastructure, however, was well beyond EOL and in disrepair. But rather than simply upgrade to newer devices, the university’s small IT team wanted to improve the overall quality of life well into the future. This meant addressing three gaps:

• Inefficient management at scale — Each engineer spent an average of ten hours per month on travel alone, just to traverse the campus’ wide footprint and get to each MDF/IDF closet.
• Too much focus on ops — The aging infrastructure was on the brink of collapse and required each engineer to spend eight hours per month in on-site work, just to keep devices running.
• Too many devices — The infrastructure includes roughly 10,000 devices to manage, which was exhausting IP on their limited IPv4 network and too rigid to fit in tight spaces, like their remote farm closets and research labs.

Solution

The university deployed the full lineup of Nodegrid devices, including the Nodegrid Serial Console, Nodegrid Services Routers, and Nodegrid Manager. These allowed them to overcome all three gaps using remote management, automation, and consolidated functionality, to save engineers hundreds of hours every month. Download the full case study to see the complete solution and benefits.

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Automating edge deployments & lights-out management for Vapor® IO

Vapor IO provides autonomous network and data center infrastructure at the network edge. Their goal is to re-architect the traditional Internet into a distributed, ubiquitous, edge-to-edge web that serves end users with SLA-backed routing, up to twelve-nines reliability, 100-microsecond latency, and terabits-per-second bandwidth.

With 36 (and counting) major U.S. markets, and their recent expansion into Barcelona, Spain, Vapor IO needs to run operations as lean as possible. However, as they continued to scale, the complexity of their own management infrastructure stood in the way of achieving this goal.

See why they required eight hours of setup time at each site, and discover which Nodegrid technologies helped significantly streamline not only new installations, but operations and overhead as well. Download the case study for full details.

One of the company’s core values is to further business goals by making constructive changes and avoiding unnecessary complexity. This management infrastructure only added complexity and would require additional staff to maintain it. To solve this, Vapor IO would have to be proactive in closing several significant gaps:

• Each edge data center required at least five separate management devices that were not integrated together. Deployments required a skilled technician to be on site for an entire workday. This time sink would multiply in direct correlation to the total number of new sites to deploy.
• The ability to lease rackspace directly translates to revenue. But each site required Vapor IO to use at least 5RU for its own devices. As demand increased, this dead space would translate to millions in lost revenue, on top of additional power and cooling costs.
• Having disparate solutions not only increased the total points of failure, but also meant more devices to manage. This increased the likelihood of failures/outages that would require truck rolls, and also increased the ongoing operational workload required to keep many management devices running.
• A multi-vendor environment meant added overhead and rigidity that complicated procurement, project planning, and development of new designs. This made it difficult to adapt to different use cases and customer requirements.

Solution

Vapor IO deployed the modular Nodegrid Net SR. This appliance provided the capabilities they needed to automate deployments and support lights-out management. The LTE module allows staff to remotely connect to sites and bring resources online, while the SFP module allows each site to connect to their nationwide fiber backbone.

Want to know how to set up a Silver Peak appliance and Palo Alto Networks firewall? In our latest video, Director of Solution Engineering Rene Neumann walks you through how to easily create an edge platform using the Nodegrid Gate SR and ZPE Cloud.

This hardware and cloud platform gives you:

SD-WAN capabilities, allowing you to simultaneously connect to Ethernet, fiber, and cellular
Enterprise-class firewall, allowing you to secure all traffic into and out of your edge site

These Silver Peak and Palo Alto templates are available to all customers, and make it easy to deploy and configure virtual machines necessary for edge sites.

Get a hands-on demo

Want to see how easy this is to deploy in your environment? Click the button below to set up a one-on-one demo with Rene himself.

The Internet Association of Australia, or IAA, operates an Internet exchange network that provides peering, virtual leased line (VLL), and cloud access services throughout Australia, with a goal to create better, 100% reliable Internet for the country. Internet peering is the building block of what makes up the Internet, and is critical for businesses, public organizations, and individuals to connect to valuable digital resources. This means the proper critical infrastructure must be in place to support the growing demand for everything from web hosting, to education, video streaming, gaming, and the myriad of other digital services.

But for IAA to keep up with their performance targets — which aim to provide 100% availability and 900Gbps speeds during peak times — they must sustain their infrastructure with frequent improvements, updates, and modernization efforts. This means constantly evaluating which equipment supports their goals, and which equipment holds them back.

IAA’s existing network management solution reached end of life and became the focal point of this dilemma. With 35 distributed locations containing Arista, Cisco, and Extreme Networks, and Juniper equipment, not to mention numerous server resources, IAA required a new network management solution that could provide fiber connectivity and true lights-out management to keep their infrastructure operational around the clock. This involved overcoming the following obstacles:

• Achieving a true out-of-band management network separate from the production network, to provide management access in case of routing errors
• Providing a fully remote virtual presence at all 35 points of presence
• Providing remote upgrades to network switches and servers, with the ability to remotely recover from failed upgrades, configuration problems, and human error
• Running tools locally for packet capturing and troubleshooting
• Enabling automation for fast deployments and reduced human intervention

IAA addressed their problems by deploying the Nodegrid Net SR and Nodegrid Gate SR. Read the full case study using the link below.

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Simplified retail edge & critical remote access

Making deployment and management easy for a large retailer

A major retail company requires networking that can keep up with demand. However, having large distribution centers and enormous showrooms can push the limits of their connectivity. Internal operations rely heavily on data for logistics and inventory purposes, while customer-facing interactions need strong networking for product availability and order processing transactions. To accommodate rapid business growth, the retailer sought a branch networking solution that they could scale quickly and manage easily.

The Challenge

With traditional edge solutions deployed, the company became accustomed to high support & maintenance costs. However as business began to increase significantly, expansion became critical — but their existing system could not keep up.

The Solution

The company discovered that only Nodegrid could deliver the capabilities they needed for rapid growth. They chose a powerful combination of Nodegrid Services Router (SR) devices: the Net SR (NSR), Gate SR (GSR), and Link SR (LSR).

The Results

The combined Nodegrid solution streamlined the company’s edge networks along with their management efforts.
Instead of requiring a separate switch in the MDF and a dedicated cellular device in each IDF, the retailer needed only the NSR in the MDF. This all-in-one device eliminated the network switch and centralized these critical functions while extending capabilities to each IDF. Connecting the LSR or GSR at the department level also reduced their stack by eliminating the need for purpose-built cellular appliances throughout each store.

Read the Full Case Study

If there’s one sector that relies on network uptime more than ever before, it’s the education sector. For both in-person and virtual learning, students and staff connect to crucial resources around the world to share information. The infrastructure that enables this connectivity is critical, and in the country of Ireland, this infrastructure is deployed and maintained by HEAnet.

As the national education and research network, HEAnet is a provider who must adhere to stringent service levels in order to keep entire education communities online. But they recently faced a few major challenges as their out-of-band (OOB) management solution neared its end-of-life (EOL) date. This system was crucial to maintaining network uptime, as it gave engineers remote access to their 50+ nationwide locations. They needed to quickly roll out a new solution, but they were faced with a second challenge — limited staff.

It seemed HEAnet was stuck between a rock and a hard place. They would surely need to outsource the job, and that’s when they turned to Rahi, the world-renowned MSP who introduced them to ZPE Systems’ Nodegrid.

The rest is history, and for a deep dive into that lesson, download the full HEAnet case study below.

But before you do, here’s a quick refresher on critical infrastructure and why network uptime can be difficult to maintain.

Critical infrastructure and network uptime

Critical infrastructure is made up of the systems that connect sites to each other and to the rest of the world. The data center is an obvious example of where critical infrastructure is deployed. Points-of-presence (POPs) and colocations are other somewhat obvious examples. All of these house components, such as servers, switches, and routers, which are essential to handling data and traffic that organizations rely on.

Here are more examples of where critical infrastructure is commonly found:

• Warehouses: servers, routers, and Wi-Fi access points help humans and their automated counterparts track inventories, fulfill orders, and communicate with vendors.
• Manufacturing plants: operationalized technology like sensors and IoT devices collect data from gauges, robots, and machining equipment to ensure accurate measurements, maintain quality control, and streamline fabrication processes.
• Cellular base stations: compute, storage, and failover devices process signals, store data, and provide backup connectivity for critical cell site components.

Organizations must maintain high levels of network uptime for their critical infrastructure, since it supports the lifeblood of everything they do. But this can be a challenge because these components are not always located within convenient reach of skilled engineers.

Why can network uptime be so challenging to maintain?

Maintaining network uptime can be challenging even for fully-staffed locations. This difficulty is amplified — quite dramatically — when organizations have to recover and maintain sites that are located far off the beaten path.

Imagine this: you’re responsible for monitoring and troubleshooting critical infrastructure for a network of college campuses in your region. One of your most remote sites, which serves more than one thousand students and faculty on any given day, experiences sudden disruptions and eventually goes offline. It’ll take close to four hours for you to put skilled staff on site to recover the network, which puts you at risk of breaching your SLA. You and your team are stressed out and scrambling, while students and teachers have no option but to cancel some or all of their activities.

Now imagine that you have a tool that allows you to respond instantly and restore the network before anyone even notices. That’s the kind of power you can achieve with a deep, robust out-of-band management solution, which is one of the tools HEAnet deployed to keep disruptions from reaching users.

There’s more that can go wrong, however. Your sites could suffer an ISP outage, leaving locations in the dark if they don’t employ any wireless backup connections. Or if your customer has a multi-vendor MSP solution that you’re part of, the other vendor’s components may be to blame, and you need a tool that can help you quickly diagnose the root cause.

Download the HEAnet case study

To see more challenges you might face when maintaining network uptime, download the HEAnet case study. You’ll also discover how Nodegrid gave them seamless backup connectivity and allowed a single Rahi engineer to deploy two sites in a single day. Get the case study now.

Critical network infrastructure drives business. Like a system of roadways, it determines how efficiently communications move to and from your organization. This affects everything such as the speed of customer banking transactions, to the reliable access IT support teams have to maintaining enterprise resources.

The problem is, complexity can easily bog down your critical network infrastructure. When this happens, user experiences can lag at ATMs and checkout lines, and IT teams can be cut off from providing off-site support. When you’re a company such as DigiCert, who serves nearly 90% of Fortune 500 companies, slowdowns and failures simply aren’t an option.

In this post, we’ll discuss some of the challenges of critical network infrastructure, and show you why DigiCert chose Nodegrid to streamline operations.

Critical network infrastructure challenges

One of the overarching challenges to critical network infrastructure is the volume of complexity. When you have several data center locations and many branch sites distributed globally, even a little bit of complexity can scale out of control. So what contributes to this? Having so many devices and solutions.

For DigiCert, every location required a large stack of essential devices. These included servers, switches, routers, out-of-band hardware, and cellular failover boxes. Managing these proved slow, as each came from a different vendor and had its own management protocols and interface. When support tickets came in, backlogs mounted as teams struggled with Mean Time To Innocence (MTTI) and root cause analyses. Licensing, updating, and maintaining their most important systems was a major time sink at the data center and branch. In short, DigiCert’s critical network infrastructure was demanding too much time and too many resources to be sustainable.

This inflated infrastructure also brought more points of failure, which were difficult to pinpoint and resolve. DigiCert lacked a centralized management solution, so they had to devote more effort to troubleshooting whether the current issue lied within a bad server configuration, an overheating device, or a faulty router.

The company also lacked peace of mind regarding remote out-of-band management access. Occasionally, support teams would be unable to troubleshoot and resolve problems remotely. This typically resulted in on-site visits to the data center, where the only solution would be to gain direct console port access to specific devices. This only added to their IT burden and grew the complexity of their operations.

How Nodegrid radically improved DigiCert’s critical network infrastructure

Eliminating critical network infrastructure complexity can seem like a daunting bridge to cross. Consolidating your physical infrastructure can be an enormous task all by itself, much less implementing centralized management and reliable out-of-band.

But for DigiCert, ZPE Systems’ Nodegrid and ZPE Cloud made it simple to achieve all this — while helping the company maintain an impenetrable security posture. They were able to deploy multiple services on a single Nodegrid device, which reduced their hardware footprint by a 4-to-1 ratio. They hosted their Palo Alto security solutions directly on the Nodegrid appliance, and set up 4G/LTE for connection redundancy. In total, they achieved a redundant configuration by using two Nodegrid devices at each location, instead of the 6-8 that they previously required.

To learn more about this implementation, download the full case study. You’ll explore the all-in-one Nodegrid solution that exceeded DigiCert’s requirements, slashed their workload 50%, and helped them achieve near 100% network uptime.

Not quite. In this post, we’ll explore three reasons your complex critical remote infrastructure is costing you, and how Nodegrid is the simple solution that helps you save.

If you’re short on time, here’s a two-minute video explaining how you can cut through the complexity of managing your network.

Deploying critical remote infrastructure

You’re probably familiar with long deployment times for your critical remote infrastructure. Manually provisioning and setting up networks consumes a lot of time and resources. The obvious costs here are the staff wages and device shipping expenses; however, the not-so-obvious cost is the business opportunity that you miss. The longer it takes you to deploy, the longer your location goes without meeting demand or generating revenue.

How can you minimize this cost? By using zero touch provisioning.

Zero touch provisioning uses automation to automatically configure and build your networks. Instead of putting staff on site to manually set up each device in your stack, you can instruct even unskilled staff to simply plug in and boot your devices. Zero touch provisioning does the rest of the work and can bring you online in hours.

Not all zero touch provisioning is the same, though. Most vendors only allow you to use it for their devices or products, which means unless you standardize on their offerings, you’re going to be limited in terms of what systems and services you can automatically deploy. On top of this, you still need to pre-configure devices and put sensitive info at risk, as well as perform manual orchestration and firmware updates.

This is where Nodegrid sets itself apart. Because it features the vendor-neutral Nodegrid OS, it allows you to use your choice of automation tools as well as build custom scripts to orchestrate across devices and environments. This means you can use true zero touch provisioning that extends to every part of your infrastructure — from configuring end devices from different vendors, to bootstrapping VMs, activating service licenses, and setting up your entire network. It offers airtight security as well, because you can completely provision bare-metal devices via ZPE Cloud.

When it comes to your critical remote infrastructure, Nodegrid is your go-to solution for fast, complete, and secure network deployments.

Keeping critical remote infrastructure online

How often does your critical remote infrastructure go offline? When it does, you can suffer losses at a rate of $5,000 or more per minute, according to Gartner. And this only covers the monetary portion. You also need to consider the reputation damage, degradation of trust, and decreased customer satisfaction that result from sudden outages.

If you’re familiar with redundant solutions, you know that these can be a life saver — but on the other hand, they come with two times the number of solutions that you need to purchase, deploy, and manage.

You typically need to deploy two boxes for each function you wish to add redundancy to, and connect them in a high availability configuration. In other words, two firewalls, two routers, two SD-WAN boxes, etc. All this means the initial and ongoing burden of redundancy can be…off-putting.

However, Nodegrid devices feature a powerful hypervisor that allows you to deploy virtualized network functions (VNFs). The onboard, multi-core Intel CPU and Linux-based Nodegrid OS provide you with enough resources to spin up VMs, guest operating systems, applications, and Docker containers directly on Nodegrid appliances. Instead of spending tons of money on more devices that clutter your infrastructure and management efforts, you can host firewalls, virtual routers, SD-WAN solutions, and custom and third-party solutions on one box. You can easily shrink a redundant setup of six devices into two Nodegrid boxes.

Beyond covering your network services with redundancy, Nodegrid also gives you built-in 5G/4G LTE connectivity available via two and four SIM cards, respectively. You don’t have to worry about a main line outage taking down an entire office or store location. Nodegrid automatically switches to your backup cellular connections, so you can keep critical remote infrastructure online and operations running.

Responding to critical remote infrastructure problems

It can be difficult to manage critical remote infrastructure because it’s, well, remote. You may have store locations that are very far away from any skilled IT staff. Or you may operate in an industry such as utilities or oil and gas, where you have critical components distributed across power grids or offshore drilling platforms.

Unless you have a robust remote management tool in place, you’re losing time and money responding to problems. This also means the user experience suffers and is difficult to optimize.

For your business, the losses can start to pile up even before an issue is reported. Your efforts are pulled into managing and dispatching IT teams for on-site support, while users and customers put up with poor network performance or even complete outages.

But when you use Nodegrid and ZPE Cloud, you gain in-depth management capabilities that allow you to fully support your network from a distance. You can save significantly on operational costs by reducing or eliminating the need to roll support trucks. That’s because ZPE Cloud gives you a complete view of your distributed infrastructure, and gives you convenient remote access to manage all your solutions. Use your browser to securely connect without a VPN. You can instantly troubleshoot issues and even reboot devices from thousands of miles away.

Want more tactics to help you reduce downtime?

Watch our free webinar to see how you can cut downtime 50% or more using a Fortune 500 strategy.

Out-of-band management brings critical connectivity to your network infrastructure. As a secure way to access your systems, out-of-band (OOB) helps you troubleshoot issues, patch devices, and maintain uptime with more control of your network.

Here’s a 90-second video explaining how OOB helps you prevent data center disruptions.

Out-of-band also delivers crucial capabilities far beyond the data center. When coupled with cellular failover connectivity, you can deploy OOB solutions to take control of your most remote sites. In fact, one major media provider took advantage of OOB & cellular failover by implementing Nodegrid at their rural locations. Continue reading to find out more.

Out-of-Band; Cellular Failover Bring Big Benefits

• With a secure OOB path and modern connection speeds, you can establish a reliable and fast access path to your networks. You don’t have to juggle delicate admin protocols or put up with slow modems & phone lines. Instead, you can respond instantly to issues and mitigate downtime.
• OOB allows you to cut down on support costs and effort. Without a comprehensive solution, you’re forced to put staff on-site for issues large and small. This means spending time & money collaborating staff schedules, setting up travel arrangements, and coordinating support timelines & resources. But OOB lets you put your best people on the job instantly, even if they are thousands of miles away from the network location. Just imagine turning a three-day hassle into a three-minute job.
• Using cellular failover, you can get reliable backup connectivity for your production and management networks. This boosts the resilience of your support efforts, and at the same time helps you maintain steady customer satisfaction levels.

How Does Nodegrid Make Out-of-Band Better?

Nodegrid brings advanced out-of-band capabilities to organizations across the globe. Whereas traditional OOB solutions involve modems, phone lines, and vendor-specific UIs, Nodegrid features OOB that’s simple fast. That’s because ZPE Systems’ innovation-driven engineers focused heavily on the drawbacks of legacy solutions, and created out-of-band that’s easy to deploy & use.

You can roll out Nodegrid on your existing system without any overhaul. Just deploy the standalone ISO image and get a view of your network infrastructure, no matter which vendor solutions you use. To make management simple, Nodegrid Manager comes standard and gives you a clean, unified UI to control all your network devices, both physical and virtual. You can access your OOB network securely from your browser, whether you’re using a desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

Nodegrid’s advanced out-of-band is supported by broadband connection, and is also accessible via cellular. This gives you added peace of mind knowing that if your main connection goes down, you can keep your networks running and maintain management access via cellular failover. For even more redundancy and reliability, Nodegrid devices support up to 4 SIM slots, giving you backups for your backups.

Who Uses Nodegrid’s Advanced Out-of-Band?

A large media company required a strong defense from downtime. A major obstacle, however, was the fact that the enterprise served very rural areas that could be difficult to support.

For each service area, the provider deployed hardware stacks consisting of legacy solutions. When issues presented themselves, the company’s reputation hinged on how quickly they could restore service. Oftentimes this was no small feat, because they required a technician to be dispatched for troubleshooting. After lengthy travel times (upwards of hours, in some cases), the technician would connect their service computer which would allow support staff to remote-in via dial-up connection.

To uphold their reputation and customer satisfaction levels, the media provider needed to slash their response times and support costs with a more efficient out-of-band solution.

The company deployed Nodegrid, which delivered the capabilities they needed along with strong cellular connectivity and backup.

Want to learn more about Nodegrid’s advanced out-of-band? Download the case study now!