NetStar is providing network management to approximately
220 Tyco sites in Australia and New Zealand, as well
security and bandwidth management. Tyco Services,
a diversified company operating from over 220 locations
across Australia and New Zealand, has reported a dramatic
increase in the performance of its IT network because
of some clever tweaking by NetStar to improve access
to critical business applications.
Like many large organizations deploying a TCP/IP
WAN, Tyco found that e-mail and Web traffic was choking
the network at times when it was essential for mission-critical
applications to have priority. The problem peaked
at month end when the accounting and payroll systems
were performing their most important tasks. “At
the end of every month lots of our users were ringing
up complaining about the network performance,”
explained Michael Pilling, Tyco Services National
IT Manager. Applications such as the ERP system were
being swamped by more aggressive network traffic like
Web and e-mail.
NetStar was engaged by Tyco to investigate the network
performance problems and to develop a solution. Rather
than suggesting expensive wholesale changes to the
communications and computing infrastructure, NetStar
came up with an innovative and cost-effective three-pronged
solution:
upgrading most hub site routers with current models,
providing a consistent WAN platform and enabling
QoS
installing an application-aware Packeteer packet
shaping device to provide predictable bandwidth
management.
implementing a special application performance
monitoring tool to measure the performance of specific
applications across the LAN and WAN, and identify
the total delay from the end user’s perspective.
“Since redesigning the network the number of
calls about network downtime has gone down 90% and
that even takes account of unavoidable outages like
power fluctuations in the remote sites. We just aren’t
getting complaints about general performance at all
now.”
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