Case Study | Woodstream

The Company

Woodstream manufactures and markets over 2,500 unique products under 17+ brands. The company’s wide area network connects all of its U.S. locations to the headquarters data center in Lititz, Pennsylvania, plus connects headquarters and the United Kingdom (U.K.) facilities. The U.S. headquarters has one MPLS circuit to the U.K. office and three broadband links. The U.K. office has the MPLS circuit plus two broadband links. Network traffic includes Citrix, email, file sharing, database replication and warehouse management.

The Challenge

Prior to installing the Ecessa solution, each remote Woodstream location had just one Internet connection. “Some of our locations are in the middle of nowhere, making it hard to find Internet connections with decent service,” said Larry Schumacher, Woodstream’s network administrator. When Internet links failed, Woodstream locations lost connectivity and in many cases couldn’t work at all.

“In our environment, 100% network uptime is critical. Our business is manufacturing and distribution, and our mechanism for getting orders to our plants is our VPN fabric,” said Schumacher.

The Solution

Woodstream implemented Ecessa’s WANworX® SD-WAN technology to enable the use of multiple ISP connections with VPN tunnels. The goal was for each location to have two broadband connections from different ISPs to mitigate the very real risk of an outage. According to Larry, “Every day one or two ISP connections go down, but that’s no longer an issue since we installed the Ecessa solution. That problem is gone.”

The Results

Creating a virtualized WAN with Ecessa’s SD-WAN solution enables Woodstream’s network traffic to flow over all available communication links. If a line goes down, traffic is automatically routed to the remaining good links, then routed back when the line comes back up. “Now even when our MPLS links fail, which they do from time to time, our users don’t notice anything different. With WANworX in place, we’ve never had a problem, we’ve never gone down. Ever.”