AEROCELL, a US composite manufacturing company whose products are widely used by the aerospace industry, heavily depends on its ERP system to optimise and standardises its manufacturing and product ordering process. Using a VPN infrastructure, Aerocell runs its ERP between its two facilities located in the state of Washington.
“The ERP application is imperative. We estimate that a loss of WAN connectivity at any point during a regular work day would decrease our productivity levels about 40% in terms of processing,” said Aerocell’s Brandon Green.
Understanding the consequences associated with WAN downtime, Aerocell sought to find a product that would help it actualise WAN redundancy for its VPN. “Aerocell uses FatPipe Networks’ MPVPN to ensure always-up connectivity,” he said.
The MPVPN unit at Aerocell’s site in Marysville bonds three T1 lines and a DSL connection, providing increased speed due to the aggregation of the lines, while providing redundancy of inbound and outbound traffic for that site. Similarly, the Newport facility bonds two DSL connections and a T1 line through a second MPVPN unit. When a data line or any component or service fails, FatPipe automatically and seamlessly reroutes traffic to available lines.
The MPVPNs sit transparently in Aerocell’s WAN. Its ability to work with any VPN technology as well as bond any combination of data lines -- without the need for BGP or the co-operation from its ISPs -- is designed to save Aerocell time and money. “We see a savings of about $US500 a month, just by bonding DSL connections with T1s,” commented Green.
FatPipe is said to be the only product of its kind that can sustain a VPN session even if one of the lines fails, no session re-initiation is required.
“The MPVPN has been flawless for us; we have not had any WAN downtime since the product has been installed,” said Green.