19 January 2007
Situation Analysis
Hanvic South Yarra Auto Parts (HSY) was established in
1961 as an importer of Volkswagen spare parts.
Since then, the company has grown into Australia's largest independent importer and distributor of spare parts to suit Audi, BMW, Mercedes Benz, Saab and Volkswagen.
The company currently carries approximately 10,000 line items of OEM (original equipment manufacturers), genuine and aftermarket spare parts.
It is the official distributor of most German automotive components and is headquartered in Melbourne, Victoria with branch/warehouse operations in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. HSY is able to offer parts distribution services throughout Australia.
All branches rely on a comprehensive stock tracking and inventory management application, so a secure, efficient network infrastructure is essential.
Although HSY had been happy with its existing IPSEC VPN (virtual private network), the company started to experience severe reliability issues when its service provider changed ownership and the infrastructure was no longer suitable for running mission critical applications.
Challenge
The new service had to provide high speed, secure infrastructure for the company’s critical stock management application. HSY also runs an ERP system that is provided to remote branches via terminal services. At peak times, system this carries a great deal of printer traffic, running the risk of overloading an unstable infrastructure.
HSY also flagged that a forthcoming IT project would add further demands to the network. It was clear that the company needed a high speed VPN solution to deliver high quality, premium grade data services to handle the current and future demands.
Solution
A Telarus Premium IP VPN service was designed for HSY that incorporated a fibre-optic-based Ethernet VLAN service to their head office in Richmond and Telarus Premium DSL tails for their branch offices.
This solution is well supported by the Telarus next generation IP/MPLS network, which was specifically designed to facilitate data communications between customer sites while appropriately handling mixed traffic types.
In HSY’s case, this required carrying a mix of email, file and print traffic alongside access to their e-commerce platform and allowing for future time-sensitive applications such as IP telephony, Citrix and terminal services.
Each office site was enabled for IP QoS (Quality of Service) using Cisco 800 series routers and can access head office via a 10Mb/s Ethernet VLAN. Delivered over fibre-optic cable, this service is scalable to 100Mb/s symmetric with no need for additional hardware.
Benefits
- 10Mb/s Ethernet VLAN service in Richmond couples speed with high reliability and excellent scalability
- 2M/384K Telarus Premium DSL links in branches offices offering high speed access to head office
- MLPS-based IP VPN offers secure inter-office data transmission with no IPSec overhead
- Fully managed private IP VPN
- Significantly faster access to e-commerce platform for stock lookup and online ordering
- Head office no longer frustrated by slow Internet and email
- 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 performance issues
- Ethernet service backed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with target availability of 99.95%
- SHDSL services are also backed by an SLA with target availability of 99.9%