How Opengear’s Solution Delivers Immediate ROI for Network Engineers

Highlights

• International e-commerce market leader is an online marketplace that specializes in flash sales. Founded in France, it quickly became a popular destination for consumers looking for deals on their favorite premium brands.
• The company built a redundant infrastructure to ensure business continuity. However, they found that network resilience is also crucial. For example, when one of the redundancies (paths) is down, they are at risk, so a speedy restoration is required. Therefore, they want to restore the issue as fast as possible to minimize additional risk.
• While redundancy is essential in improving overall network strength, resiliency is critical in recovering redundant components after a fault occurrence. That’s why the e-commerce market leader’s network team decided to focus on both redundancy and resilience to enhance the overall strength and quality of their network. According to the network team, even if just one in ten upgrades doesn’t go as planned and creates an issue, using Opengear’s solution can help avert service disruptions and translate into positive ROI.

Customer Story

Our customer is an online marketplace specializing in flash sales. Created in France, the marketplace quickly became a popular destination for consumers looking for deals on their favorite premium brands.

It now has more than 6,000 employees, sources over five million products per year and welcomes 4.5 million visitors per day to its state-of-the-art e-commerce platform. The company strives to delight its customers regularly, processing 130,000 orders and shipping 90,000 products daily. Serving customers in 14 European countries, and their marketplace supports its operations via ten warehouses and four data centers. All of this tremendous productivity and speed requires cutting-edge technology, an extremely capable team, and last but not least, a very resilient network.

Challenge

This French trailblazer’s network is the backbone of its business. Reliable, fast connections to its network and systems are non-negotiable, helping keep its employees productive and its customers loyal. If you support millions of customers and move thousands of packages each day, you need to ensure your website works without any interruptions, says, the product owner for network says, in this cutting-edge organization. As they further explain it, “If there is an issue with the website, it means customers cannot purchase their favorite brands. If there is a challenge with one of our warehouses, then we cannot ship orders. All of this impacts the business.”

When the network team opened up their data center in 2017, everything was working properly. Yet the team later discovered that one of the switches in their data center was shutting down repeatedly. Forced to travel to the data center, the team decided that best effort is nice, but for a quality network, you must have a proper connection – namely, an out-of-band network in the IT environment.

The company built a redundant infrastructure to ensure business continuity. However, as the product owner for the network explained, “When one of the redundancies [paths] is down, you are at risk. So you want to restore the one [path] having an issue as fast as possible to minimize your additional risk.”

With an issue arising in the middle of the night at this data center, the team had two-to-four-hour SLAs before starting troubleshooting. The two-to-four-hour window promised no impact to the network except for probable latency. Yet, as the networking team notes, “For four hours you are at risk. So if you can minimize your risk, you’d rather be at risk for 20 minutes instead.” The team stressed that redundancy helps with business continuity, yet it does not deliver resiliency. Most businesses see redundancy as essential for overall network strength. However, resilience is critical to recover redundant components to the functional state following a fault occurrence.

Solution

When the team decided to invest in an out-of-band network for their IT environment, their trusted reseller recommended Opengear. The product owner of the networking team, one of the project leaders, was already familiar with the brand. So the network team decided to evaluate Opengear’s Smart Out of Band solution to make an informed decision.

Satisfied with Opengear’s solution, the team decided to proceed with the Console Manager CM8100 product family. CM8100 is Opengear’s newest console manager designed for data centers and large compute environments and offers up to 96 serial console ports with simple straight-through cabling to Cisco-style serial consoles. Additionally, each unit provides enterprise grade security using TPM 2.0 module, and independent monitoring using dual power supplies. CM8100 interfaces with Opengear’s Lighthouse Centralized Management platform for streamlined access, management, and monitoring.

The network team uses Opengear’s  CM8116-2-DAC Console Managers to connect the routers and firewalls in their data centers. As CM8116 comes with 16 serial ports, they even have redundancy for their Smart Out of Band Network with Opengear.

Although network redundancy and resiliency are often used interchangeably, they serve different purposes. Redundancy helps maintain business continuity by providing backup resources, but it alone does not ensure resilience. Even if IT organizations invest in expensive redundancy projects, they still must consider resilience to address disruptions that may occur. Opengear’s Smart Out of Band solution provides resilience to both physical and virtual network resources. While redundancy is essential to improve overall network strength, resilience is critical to recovering redundant components after a fault occurrence. That’s why the network team decided to focus on reliability and performance to enhance the overall strength of their network.

Results

After installing Opengear, this e-commerce leader immediately experienced the benefits of network resilience. The product owner and their team perform regular leaf/spine firmware upgrades as part of their data center operations. Usually, the network resumes itself by default, but occasionally, an upgrade failure may occur. If just one in ten upgrades results in an issue, Opengear’s capabilities for mitigating the issue in time to prevent losses makes their investment in Opengear easily worth it, they state.

The product owner at network team recalls a time when a fellow network team member had to physically travel to ensure a successful upgrade to the system. The team once faced an issue with a stack of switches on the critical path. Although they typically avoid deploying a stack of switches on a critical network path, in this case, they had to. If the stack went down for an extended time due to a connectivity or upgrade failure, the marketplace and the website would have suffered an impact. Opengear proved particularly helpful in this instance, since it enables the network team to conduct upgrades remotely, with no need for consuming time on travel.

The product owner and his team of ten engineers are spread out across Europe. On that specific occasion, they were on call in Amsterdam when they learned that a faulty switch in Paris had impacted a portion of their website. Using Opengear’s console manager CM8116, they were able to connect to the device in Paris and restore in about 20 minutes, with no need to dispatch a network engineer from their team or third party to the site. Instead of being at risk for two to four hours, their time to resolution was just 20 minutes.

According to the product owner, managing their network with Opengear has minimized the risk of downtime and makes their network more resilient. Considering that this international e-commerce leader operates in ten countries and runs four warehouses and two data centers, this translates to 60-80 hours of employee time saved over two years, amounting to 4,000-6,000 Euros in cost savings. Moreover, it has prevented tens of thousands of Euros in losses to the business as well as the damaging effects of customer dissatisfaction.