Building supply firm improves business efficiency and end-user quality of experience with Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform

Across the U.S., construction professionals know where to go for high-quality building products— Builders FirstSource, a leading national supplier and manufacturer of structural building materials for commercial and residential construction projects. But the company’s WAN, built using traditional routers, was difficult to manage and could no longer keep up with business growth.

An aging patchwork of switches and routers forced remote sites to backhaul all traffic to one of two central data centers. For Senior Network Manager Greg Taylor, this complex network approach required a fresh look to not only simplify the WAN, but also improve efficiency and performance in the process. “To me, SD-WAN was the answer to our network issues,” Taylor says.

刚起作用的SD-WAN

Doing his due diligence, Taylor evaluated several SD-WAN vendors, including Aruba (formerly Silver Peak), Cisco Viptela, Cisco Meraki, Riverbed, Citrix, and CloudGenix. Most offerings came up short for a variety of reasons—too convoluted, lack of enterprise capabilities, only worked with one type of interface, or a disjointed platform.

相反，Aruba EdgeConnectEnterprise platform, a self-driving SD-WAN by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, stood out for its breadth of capabilities and ease-of-use. In fact, the阿鲁巴Orchestratormanagement console was a key factor in choosing Aruba.

泰勒（Taylor）解释说：“我们需要一个SD-WAN解决方案，该解决方案可提供最高水平的网络和应用程序性能，并通过集中的编排和管理简化操作。我们真的很喜欢编排器，因为使用一组通用模板，并知道它会起作用，从而更容易推出标准化配置。”

Rapid Rollout of Advanced Network Capabilities

泰勒（Taylor）和他的团队正在向所有Builders Firstsource网站推出EdgeConnect平台，迄今为止完成了大约250个部署，并每周在SD-WAN中添加十几个或更多站点。

At most sites, EdgeConnect connects to an existing MPLS circuit and a 100 Mbps broadband link. Where multiple internet service providers are available, Taylor is eliminating MPLS in favor of dual-broadband. Many sites also have a 4G LTE modem as backup.

By bonding two links at each site, enabling both links to be actively used simultaneously, and taking advantage ofadvanced capabilities如道路条件、服务质量(QoS), and dynamic path control on the platform, network uptime has improved dramatically. “We’ve had some sites lose their MPLS connection but not experience any WAN downtime,” Taylor says.

Delivering the Highest Quality of Experience

“One of our objectives with SD-WAN was to increase available bandwidth for our remote sites,” says Taylor. “We have some locations that went from 1.5 Mbps T1 lines to broadband links with 250 Mbps down and 100 Mbps up. Ridiculous speeds. Then applying QoS and traffic shaping, we’ve made our folks quite happy.”

最终用户对经验质量的影响令人震惊。例如，在一个位置下载以前花费了很长时间的电子邮件，人们会走开喝杯咖啡。

部署EdgeConnect后，泰勒说他正在与该位置的某人打电话，并要求他在电话中检查电子邮件。“他说，‘哇，它只是打开了。这从来没有发生过。’因此，我们知道SD-WAN在生产力上确实有所不同。”

WAN优化速度远程应用程序访问

Taylor and his team also added the optional阿鲁巴促进WAN优化性能包至统一的EDGECONNECT平台，以解决该公司在阿拉斯加偏远地区之一的延迟问题。

Connecting to the ERP system in Texas to run a print job back in Alaska was taking an inordinate amount of time. Using Boost provided a 90 percent improvement in effective latency so employees can complete print runs faster and move on with other tasks.

In the near future, Taylor also sees opportunities for leveraging the unified zone-based firewall within EdgeConnect to enable local internet breakout for trusted applications, as well as simplify LAN routing, at the remote sites.

简化的应用程序流量控制

泰勒还感谢EdgeConnect平台提供的可见度和对应用程序流量的控制水平的提高。泰勒说，利用统一的路由互操作性，并利用编排来创建业务意图覆盖，泰勒说：“流量是以最有效的方式自动路由的。”

Taylor has since been able to retire the old Cisco routers at most remote sites, simplifying the job of network management. For example, Taylor had some sites on the MPLS network connecting through the Texas data center to access the POS application running in California, which introduced latency.

泰勒指出：“通过编排，我们可以轻松地更改路由以避免额外的跳跃，以QoS值标记该流量，一切正常。“这为我们节省了时间真是太棒了。”

流线将新网站在线带来

作为当前SD-WAN推出approaches completion, Builders FirstSource is now positioned to continue growing having gained the ability to open new facilities more quickly and efficiently.

Taylor points out that once circuits are provisioned, he can simply plug in the EdgeConnect appliance and have it configured and fully operational in about 20 minutes. Bringing up a conventional router in that same scenario would take one of his network engineers an entire day.

“I’ve been very happy with the EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform,” Taylor reports. “It saves so much time and minimizes the likelihood of human error. With EdgeConnect we have much more granularity in how we route traffic, which gives us the flexibility we need to enable the business to grow and adapt to new opportunities.”