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Filtrona Extrusion implemented a network redesign to ensure business processes uninterrupted sites in the United States United States and Mexico.

"Outsourcing seems an attractive alternative for a lot of trouble, but turning manage their most mission-critical infrastructure to a third party is pretty scary, "says Jeff White, corporate IT director of Filtrona Extrusion. When Jeff White joined Filtrona Extrusion as corporate IT director, the company was operating a single wire network with mixed traffic, mission-critical traffic mission critical not running from side to side, and no way to separate or prioritize them. In addition, the company experienced network performance problems and increasing amounts of downtime in their facilities in Mexico. Due to its manufacturing facilities run 24 / 7 and do not always have the technical resources available at the site when there is a problem, the company needed a better solution.

"You never know when things will happen, from a dig the backhoe of a fiber cut or a major, and these situations were the closure of a given system, "says White." Because the network is fundamental to all areas of our business, we need to implement a fully redundant network to reconcile problems automatically and make sure that I could stay running, no matter what the situation. "

Filtrona Extrusion is one of the largest manufacturers of plastic extrusion profiles, specialty plates and tubes in the United States. The company manufactures over 40,000 different products for the marketing of medicine, aviation, transportation, traffic, lighting, fencing and custom plastic industries. Its products range from sounding pipes, posts and traffic cones, plastic sheets, fluorescent lights, Air conditioning ducts in commercial aircraft, and outdoor furniture.

All Filtrona Extrusion Company and manufacturing processes are based largely your network. The company's most critical business applications is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) that runs on a centralized server at corporate headquarters in Atlanta, with a standby server to replicate in real time and is located in a manufacturing plant in Tacoma, Washington The ERP system manages sales, manufacturing, purchasing, shipping and receiving, accounting, and quality information for all locations, including additional manufacturing facilities in Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Monterrey, Mexico.

White uses a custom protocol simple network management to extract data from routers directly to control circuits and overall network performance.
Since plastic is a commodity, Filtrona Extrusion must maintain full visibility across their inventory time to ensure that purchasing decisions can be more advantageous price. The loss of sight of the inventory levels for only a few hours can prevent the business opportunities to buy land or forced to use a more-expensive, higher grade of plastic that is required to fulfill a customer order. Moreover, if the ERP system is down, the company is not able to record data quality during the manufacturing process. Without data quality, there is no way to certify that the product meets the requirements specified by the client, and without certification, the product can not ship.

"Our system-wide planning depends on inventory, "says White." Without it, we do not know what materials to buy and how much to buy of existing orders, which creates a very important issues company that can cost tens of millions of dollars. "

White's first step after joining the company was evaluating the effectiveness of their suppliers external. He needed to understand what the current providers had done, and what could advance to help meet strategic business objectives.

Carrier Options Explored
"Outsourcing seems an attractive alternative for a lot of problems, but turning the management of its infrastructure more critical mission to a third party is pretty scary, "he says." When you depend on your network, you need to trust your provider, and in my experience, most are not as good as advertised. "

White and IT staff began exploring their options. To create the network that provides, White spoke to the supplier managed services Virtela Communications, which operated as Filtrona Extrusion sole provider of access. IT staff also evaluated a number of other suppliers. During the evaluation process, there were many factors to consider, and while prices were a concern, the company did not end up going to the least expensive option.

"Because the company manages the routers, most of them wanted the network design based on a template, and do not want to work with us design something creative or non-standard, "says White." The design we came up with was not what other companies were pushing. At first, Virtela showed us that had the resources and knowledge, and indeed were the only vendor that was willing to work with us and manage the infrastructure once is complete. "

For example, White wanted to implement the generic routing encapsulation (GRE) tunnels instead of using control the boundaries of more conventional Gateway (BGP) routing method. With BGP, routers talk to each other and share what routes are available. In theory, if a router goes down, left to announce their availability and the other routers to adjust and redirect traffic. There are times, however, when a circuit that appears to be functioning and available, but no traffic can pass over it due to errors, latency, fragmentation and other issues.

"I was not willing to accept any design. I absolutely needed a bulletproof to know that when I send that critical traffic over the network, which will reach the other end " White says. "The only way is to establish a tunnel from one extreme to another, and GRE tunnels to solve this problem."

Because it was a completely new network design, IT Extrusion Filtrona group worked closely with Virtela engineers to design a "double-carrier" of platform. Virtela did most of the work of the pre-engineering and dedicated engineer to work directly with the IT Group in the course of several months. Together, management designed a virtual private network (VPN) with redundant GRE tunnels used to open shortest path first routing between the hub sites critical ensure the automatic redirection of traffic on the link alternative supplier if network congestion or failure on the main road.

Design also guaranteed the network automatically load balance traffic between two networks, with Virtela managed to bring the whole network traffic mission critical data, such as ERP, and secondary transport provider non-critical traffic such as voice over IP, videoconferencing, email and the Internet.

To accommodate the new design, Filtrona Extrusion had to make some changes to the infrastructure during the planning phase. Virtela began with the installation of some new tracks and worked with the secondary provider to get their circuits in place. Once all circuits are found, the partners began a rigorous testing phase of a month making a circuit at a time, place by place, to test the strength of network design.

"Because we had a dedicated engineer to work Virtela with us, the process was very good, "says White." Apart from the few seconds that we had to make the final exchange, and the development of some minor problems on the road, there were no problems. "

As the network deployment, some minor adjustments were necessary. One of the challenges was that an unforeseen single router was being used to route traffic over two different circuits. In remote sites, non-critical data output circuit used the secondary network as designed, but when input, are not mission-critical data sent back on the primary scheduled for mission-critical traffic only has created problems.

The challenges are addressed
To resolve this problem, the manufacturer uses network address translation of origin in the primary circuit and changed default route in the secondary circuit. This ensured that the traffic coming out of the remote sites the location of the server that returns on the same circuit.

Filtrona Extrusion also encountered a minor problem with video conferencing application, which had stopped working with the new network. "Because the new design requires that packets are sent over GRE tunnels, we were losing visibility of the flag diffserv code points in the package, which has MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) network that is packet priority, "says White." We were not sure how to solve the problem, so we talked about taking the video traffic outside the tunnel and just fell straight to the MPLS network, which was less than ideal, but we will. "

Virtela came up with a different solution. Cisco has recently released a service level specification update router that had the capacity diffserv flag to translate the inner package to the outer tunnel packet, thus solving the problem. Making some minor adjustments to the settings Virtela router allows for video conferencing on the tunnel. Also, if Filtrona Extrusion of the network are not mission-critical link down, traffic Video Conference automatically failover to the primary.

VPN service management Virtela links eight sites in the United Kingdom United States And Mexico. Virtela manages two of Filtrona Extrusion 's Cisco routers located in Atlanta and Tacoma, and also owns and manages the routers at all manufacturing sites. In addition, both the Virtela network circuit and secondary circuit provider end in Filtrona Extrusion "so Virtela routers, as is now managing Virtela the entire network.

"Generally, the different operators require separate hardware and each provider is responsible for its own, so that the customer is forced to coordinate the disagreements between them, "offers White." Virtela saves us from having to manage ourselves. In addition to managing the team, also give us access to monitor routers, too. "

White uses a measure of simple network management protocol system to extract data from routers directly to control circuits and the overall functioning of the network. You can also use Web-based portal Virtela, VirtelaView to monitor network performance statistics or to obtain real-time data traffic tag Virtela. White receives regular updates and proactive global Virtela's network operations center and the routers directly about events that may be occurring in the network.

Tested in Mexico
Filtrona Extrusion recently quadrupled the size of its facilities in Mexico. During the expansion, existing circuits were transferred to another computer room. At the same time, the local provider decided to upgrade the installation of a circuit traditional LAN-based line circuit in a wireless network without informing Filtrona Extrusion of their plans.

While performing the upgrade, the circuit LAN provider went down and took three weeks to get it operational again. White received an e-mail notification of Virtela in middle of the night informing him the interruption, but with new fully redundant network in place, no one ever knew the facility was reduced the secondary network. In fact, the failover was completely transparent in both directions.

Three weeks later, when the local loop was a backup, the network back to the local provider without interruption service. "We have done many tests during the installation phase to ensure that the network was working as it should, but the large validation stop in Mexico. You never want something to happen, but when he did, was very encouraging to see that it had no impact on the business, "says White.

Before the network Fully redundant was in place, Filtrona Extrusion was experiencing network availability 85-95 percent, depending on the circuit. Now the company is constantly experiencing uptime of 99.95 percent in all circuits. Further, because the non-critical traffic is now running on another circuit, the available bandwidth for mission-critical traffic has more than doubled, and users have noticed a difference in overall performance.

Filtrona Extrusion is still operating with a small IT team in charge of network monitoring functions in the eight manufacturing facilities throughout the day and Virtela is based on after-hour supervision. "When I came on board, who did not have this type of network, and there is no way I could have done this by myself," says White. "We are looking at $ 250,000 to hire only staff who have been required to run the network, not to mention the millions of dollars that is costing us in decisions materials and loss of productivity due to downtime of the network. Now, instead of worrying about problems of network reliability, we can focus on issues strategic. "
About the Author

"Bill Dodds is vice president of sales and marketing for Virtela Communications Providing global network solutions. Virtela Communications is a full service managed service provider and network integrator. Virtela delivers award-winning managed network services to many of the world’s largest multinational companies. Contact Virtela for more information about enterprise network pandemic planning .
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