The manufacturer turned to Sinefa to better manage its network and tackle performance issues
When European plastic pipe manufacturer Wavin wanted to improve the visibility of its applications and quality of service on internet links, it turned to Australia-based data networks specialist Sinefa to come up with a solution.
Until a few years ago, the manufacturer had four data centres in Europe, plus file servers in the UK, France, Denmark, Holland, Poland and Turkey. In 2015, it moved 3,000 users to Office 365 and, a year later, moved its entire infrastructure to Microsoft Azure.
With more users on its network than ever, Wavin looked into how it could speed up its network traffic flows. The move to the cloud and the closure of data centres prompted Wavin to trial Sinefa’s technology.
It chose Sinefa because its proof of concept was simple and free to trial. Deployment was fast and flexible. The ability to use one model of probe in 79 sites and the ability to scale with the business were also attractive features.
Wavin found Sinefa easy to install and use. In particular, it appreciates the fact that all the things needed to manage a network are within a single product.
Critical applications such as Office 365 now have guaranteed bandwidth, helping to improve worker productivity. Any problems with back-ups and Windows updates have been solved. And certain links have been shaped to prioritise and protect their bandwidth, so that performance issues are now a thing of the past. Sinefa has solved multiple problems in the wide area network (WAN) too and provided insight on where the problems were coming from, which was not previously possible.
A lot of time and frustration has been saved and the business is more productive. There are fewer service desk calls, therefore technical staff can focus on other matters. The number of critical incidents reported to the network operations centre has fallen by 20% and, for example, a site of 200 people can now use critical applications reliably and consistently – something they couldn’t do before.
The company’s network manager is finding most benefit from the utilisation feature, which allows him to zoom in and drill down on network incidents. The bandwidth control feature also allows the organisation to customise the shaping policies. This is an attractive feature as some sites have marketing personnel who need certain apps, while other sites are heavy users of other compute-intensive programs.
“The amount of control we have is incredible,” says Gerben Bremmer, a technical IT specialist at the company. “The performance issues with the Telnet application are gone. By using Sinefa we have been able to solve the problems we were having with back-ups and Office 365. Sinefa has solved multiple problems in the WAN, but also gave insight on where the problems were coming from, which we previously didn’t have.”