Quintupling Capacity, Boosting Flexibility with Cato Cloud David Brouwers IT Infrastructure Manager New Wave Group creates, acquires and develops brands and products for corporate, sports, gifts, and interior design sectors. Network Capacity and Flexibility Challenges New Wave relied on MPLS to connect its European subsidiaries and Far East branch to its two corporate datacenters in Sweden and the Netherlands. Internet VPNs also connected locations to one another. For security, the company relied on centralized security appliances, requiring that all traffic be backhauled through New Wave’s two datacenters. Complexity Cost Ever since 1990, the company has been New Wave was struggling to afford global acquiring new brands and expanding at a WAN connections with enough bandwidth rapid pace. Network flexibility and quick to support its rapidly growing operations. ramp-up of new WAN connections became critical – a huge problem for MPLS. “ MPLS is really expensive. It always felt “ as if we couldn’t afford the bandwidth With MPLS, it took up to six months wereally needed.” to connect a new office or warehouse location. That was simply unacceptable for a growing business like ours.” MPLS Couldn't Support Business Needs Like many organizations, New Wave was looking for a flexible and affordable MPLS alternative. The company started launching and acquiring new brands across Europe at a rapid pace and expects to continue doing so in the coming years. MPLS couldn’t support the company’s fast growth. Reliability was another thorny issue. “Even with a large telco and lots of backup lines, we found that our MPLS went down too often,” says Brouwers. “We tried switching MPLS providers, but the improvement was minimal.” And with MPLS’s limited bandwidth, applications underperformed with staff complaints running five or ten per week under MPLS,” says Brouwers. Last-mile provider options offered by the telcos were limited, and even though they were supposedly managing their providers, New Wave found performance and reliability lacking. “When there was an outage it could take up to two days to get up and running again,” says Brouwers. “Even with a large telco and lots of backup lines, we found that our MPLS went down too often. When there was an outage it could take up to two days to get up and running again.” New Wave’s centralized security architecture was also problematic, as it required backhauling all the traffic through the security solutions at its two datacenters, with the inevitable performance hit. The Network for Whatever’s Next 5 Manufacturing Case Studies 3