Situation Analysis
Head quartered in Laverton, Melbourne, Suzuki Australia was suffering from a crippling lack of Internet bandwidth. Relying on a 256K ISDN Internet service to deliver web and email for the 65 staff at head office was becoming increasingly frustrating. In addition, the business critical application for stock lookup and online ordering was hosted on the LAN in head office, so dealers across the country were struggling with slow access to what should have been a real-time service.
The VPN was too slow for the branch offices to use effectively and often had configuration issues. The lack of reliable VPN access also prevented the Melbourne-based IT Department from easily supporting the branch offices. Branch offices had all but stopped using the VPN.
Challenge
The upgrade to high speed premium grade xDSL services was not available to Suzuki’s head office location in Laverton. Due to the physical location of the office, poor connectivity back to the local exchange made it impossible to deliver premium grade xDSL.
However, it was clear that the company needed a data solution that was at least as reliable as ISDN and gave them a significant increase in bandwidth without a significant increase in costs.
Solution
An Ethernet over fibre solution at head office would give Suzuki the required bandwidth; but there wasn’t any fibre.
Not the kind of team to let a problem like that stand in their way, Telarus set to work. They knew that the only way to deliver the kind of reliable bandwidth that Suzuki needed was to undertake a substantial fibre build. A big build for a relatively small deployment required some very tough negotiation, but due to some strong partner relationships the team managed to arrange the roll out of 8km of fibre cable straight to Suzuki’s head office, whilst avoiding large upfront charges.
The new solution delivered two 4Mb/s symmetrical Ethernet services (VLAN’s or Virtual LAN’s) to provide separate high speed VPN and Internet connections for a similar monthly spend to their current services. These connections are scalable to 10Mb/s or even 100Mb/s if required, securely future proofing Suzuki.
As an additional credit to the team the deployment was completed in just two months – four months ahead of schedule.
Benefits
- High reliability and excellent scalability of fibre is very well suited to mission-critical applications
- Increase of bandwidth from 256K ISDN to 4MB Ethernet: data transmission 16 times faster!
- Similar monthly spend to current ISDN and ADSL solution
- Significantly faster access by Suzuki Dealers to the Suzuki e-commerce platform for stock lookup and online ordering
- Head office no longer frustrated by slow Internet and email
- VPN between sites now possible
- No data charges for inter office data traffic across the new Private IP VPN
- As all internal data travels over a dedicated private network rather than via the Internet, time sensitive data is protected from Internet related issues
- Single internet gateway (best practice) for all Suzuki sites across Australia provides additional security
- Ethernet service backed by a Service Level Agreement with target availability of 99.95%.