Brake Masters Puts the Brakes on Outages Across 71 Sites with Cato Affordable MPLS Alternative • MPLS Migration to SD-WAN • Simple Network Automation Outages Keep Business in Steve Waibel, Second Gear Director of IT Network connectivity is essential to any retail operation. Unreliable, About slow network access can translate into lost revenue through credit Brake Masters card processing delays and lower customer satisfaction as guest Wi-Fi grinds to a halt. Brake Masters is an auto repair chain in the western Just ask Steve Waibel. The director of IT for Brake Masters, a leading United States with 71 auto-repair chain spanning 71 sites across the United States, had company-owned retail been struggling with his legacy MPLS service. The MPLS network stores and 30 franchises. connected Brake Masters’ 71 stores with T1 lines, carrying Point of Before migrating to Cato, Scale (PoS) system for credit card processing and the guest Wi-Fi the company owned- for customers to pass the time while waiting to get their cars repaired stores, served by Brake back to the Brake Masters datacenter in Tucson, Arizona. Masters IT, had redundant But Waibel found that the MPLS to be “just plain unreliable” and slow, firewall appliances he says. “We faced weekly outages in one store or another,” he says. connected by T1 lines and MPLS. All traffic was sent The network was also unable to deliver a decent guest Wi-Fi experience. from the retail locations The free Wi-Fi from Brake Masters was often limited to just 500 Kbits/s, to a datacenter in Tucson, far too slow for YouTube or to do much more than basic Web browsing. Arizona. The primary “We got quite a few complaints about that,” Waibel says. applications were point- And MPLS proved to be a drag on Brake Masters’ schedule for opening of-sale (PoS) systems and new stores. When a new store was ready to open, they were often retail customer Wi-Fi. waiting on connectivity. “We had an ongoing issue with provisioning MPLS,” Waibel says. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 6