Electric Company Case Study

An electric company serving reliable energy to more than 170,000 consumers in five north metro Atlanta counties is on the cutting edge of technology, implementing innovative and cost saving initiatives that increase the company’s productivity levels and provide better services to customers. Part of those initiatives included an upgrade to WAN services and implementing a disaster recovery plan.

The company’s LAN/WAN Director first addressed WAN failure issues by incorporating FatPipe WARP at its main site, bonding two connections to achieve redundancy at that site. “We’re about ready to add a third T1,” said the Director, to support its growing WAN infrastructure needs.

In addition, all of its mission critical servers are mirrored at a disaster recovery site, including a site-failover WARP, to achieve a total site failure solution.

Each office has a WARP, which bonds lines from separate ISPs connected by a fiber loop. They effectively established data-line failover at both offices by setting up a single WARP at each location. They also accomplished a total site failover solution by implementing the site failover between the disaster recovery and main office locations.

As WARP supports many mission critical web applications, such as web access for online customer service, work management applications, etc., the Director setup a WARP site failover, with a second box residing at the remote disaster recovery site. FatPipe is as the only company that can do multiple line to multiple line site to site failover to achieve the ultimate level of WAN redundancy.

Apart from WAN fault tolerance, increased speed from aggregating lines from different providers, load balancing, and policy routing are added benefits. “The flexibility of the product and the fact that we’re not locked into one ISP and do not require ISP participation in the setup, makes it an easy implementation,” said the Director.

“It gives you super protection if one ISP goes down it automatically fails over to the second ISP. It is also a lot less expensive than getting a router – which can accommodate only two lines – to hold all the ARP tables needed for load balancing between ISPs,” he concluded. “WARP provides excellent ROI. We’re not going down anymore and we didn’t have to purchase that expensive router.” The router and implementation programming costs were estimated at $75,000.

Depending on its location, a business should assess the risks as a range of probabilities. The risks come under three major groups. They are:

The company utilized FatPipe WARP to bond its unreliable data line with a more stable line, and later replaced the unreliable ISP with an additional larger ISP carrier, to achieve the highest level of WAN redundancy and speed.

FatPipe WARP provides the WAN fault tolerance and speed the company needed to begin new customer service programs that are WAN application based. It also set up a WARP site failover unit at its Disaster Recovery site for added protection and business continuity.

Whichever option is decided upon, IT Managers should ensure that redundancies are available at all times.