Internet Outage | FatPipe Networks Blog

11 Sep

Top 100 Furniture Retailer Chooses FatPipe SD-WAN to Ensure Business Continuity

SALT LAKE CITY, UT– One of America’s top 100 furniture retailers* has chosen FatPipe SD-WAN technology for multi-line network redundancy and fail-over. Processing orders and general office communications are supported by a site-to-site VPN infrastructure directly connected to its headquarters. “Computer automation is a key element to our overall business process,” said the Network Engineer. A stable VPN is essential to the furniture outlet’s ability to conduct business.

The company realized how mission critical its VPN was when communications to one of its warehouses was cut off for one entire business day due to a downed line. The line was physically cut, accidentally, on account of construction in the area. The data stream was stopped and productivity was significantly affected. They experienced delays in putting through orders because they had to revert to manual processes. Their inventory control was difficult to maintain and had to be reconciled from paper records once the data line was available again.

“Our entire business process for that location was affected when our VPN went down,” said the Network Engineer. Other applications, including email, accounting, inventory software, and warehouse management software all were run over the VPN. “We hit the point where downtime is unacceptable,” said the Network Engineer.

He and his team researched ways to mitigate the effects of WAN downtime. They first considered BGP. According to the Network Engineer, it was a hassle. “We started the ball rolling on implementing BGP and the more we got into it, the more difficult it was becoming, so we looked for an easier solution that was just as effective, but less expensive and time consuming. We chose FatPipe SD-WAN.”

Not only can FatPipe’s SD-WAN conduct line failover automatically, it is dynamic and works with the company’s diverse combination of data lines including DSL – something BGP simply cannot do. The company uses FatPipe to aggregate a mixed breed of DSL, T1, wireless, and Metro-Ethernet rings at the various sites. Data is automatically failed over to available lines if a connection, component, or service fails.

The company also enjoys the added benefit of FatPipe’s patented security overlay technology, MPSec, which provides an additional layer of security.

The Network Engineering teams are implementing other mission critical applications, including VoIP, over its VPN, where IP data route control and QoS will come into play. These features are integrated into FatPipe’s SD-WAN solution.

ABOUT FATPIPE

FatPipe® Networks founders Dr. Ragula Bhaskar and Sanchaita Datta invented the concept of software defined wide area networking and hybrid WANs that eliminate the need for hardware and software, or cooperation from ISPs and allows companies to control WAN traffic. FatPipe currently has 11 U.S. patents and over 180 technology claims related to multipath, software defined networking. FatPipe technology provides the world’s best intra-corporate wide area network solutions that transcend Internet and other network failures to maintain business continuity and high transmission security. FatPipe, with several thousand customers, has offices in the United States, and around the world, with over 700 resellers worldwide including almost all national resellers in the US.

*FatPipe does not release the names of its customers as a general policy of confidentiality.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Hayley Doehler

(801)281-3434 ext. 2221

E-mail hayley@fatpipeinc.com

31 Aug

Law Firm Chooses FatPipe SD-WAN Solution

Firm Uses FatPipe SD-WAN Technology to Achieve Reliability & Redundancy for Its VPN & VoIP Applications by Augmenting MPLS With Dedicated Internet Connections

SALT LAKE CITY, UT–(Marketwired – August 27, 2015) – A leading law firm well known for its public service and pro bono advocacy has chosen FatPipe SD-WAN technology. With over 450 lawyers specialized in litigation and corporate transactions supporting multinational corporations, wide area network (WAN) connectivity is crucial for the firm.

As an integral part of its communications system, the firm deploys a wide variety of services and applications over its WAN. They utilized MPLS circuits to support the primary WAN needs and were looking for a way to increase bandwidth and WAN reliability. The firm did not want to incur the exorbitant costs of additional MPLS circuits. Through extensive research on how to accomplish its objective, the law firm chose FatPipe’s SD-WAN technology.

“We decided to go with FatPipe SD-WAN because we were looking to increase bandwidth, balance load, and have a failover solution using MPLS and Internet connections. FatPipe gave us the flexibility we were looking for, using both private and public lines,” said the Senior Networking Engineer.

The firm combines MPLS circuits and 100 Mbps connections using FatPipe SD-WAN technology at its New York and Washington DC sites, along with two FatPipe devices setup in automatic unit failover mode at its headquarters located in Chicago. It runs many of its applications originating from the corporate office in Chicago, including payroll, accounting and extranets, which is why it has the failover unit cluster. Every office has its own data center and local Exchange servers to support email and local file exchanges such as litigation support applications.

An IPSec VPN tunnel was setup between the offices as an alternative path if the MPLS goes down. Utilizing FatPipe policy routing tools, the firm runs VoIP and backups on the MPLS, while the day-to-day data transfers, emails, and Intranets for clients are active on its VPN using the 100 Mbps Internet connections.

“FatPipe has met our objectives indefinitely,” said the Senior Networking Engineer. “It works beautifully. We have experienced a few circuit failures, and none of our end-users noticed because of FatPipe’s automatic failover. Management is easy too.”

The team also enjoys an excellent working relationship with FatPipe’s technical support staff, knowing that they are available whenever they have questions.

“FatPipe’s SD-WAN technology has performed above our expectations, with no failure whatsoever since deployment,” he added.

ABOUT FATPIPE

FatPipe® Networks founders Dr. Ragula Bhaskar and Sanchaita Datta invented the concept of software defined wide area networking and hybrid WANs that eliminate the need for hardware and software, or cooperation from ISPs and allows companies to control WAN traffic. FatPipe currently has 11 U.S. patents and over 180 technology claims related to multipath, software defined networking. FatPipe technology provides the world’s best intra-corporate wide area network solutions that transcend Internet and other network failures to maintain business continuity and high transmission security. FatPipe has offices in the United States, and around the world, with over 700 resellers worldwide including almost all national resellers in the US. FatPipe does not release the names of its customers as a general policy of confidentiality.

Contact Information
For more information, please contact:
Hayley Doehler
(801) 281-3434 ext. 2221
Email contact

17 Sep

Network Outages Again Today

FatPipe was hit with numerous phone calls today by potential customers whose primary ISP connection went down. After some research we discovered several tier 1 ISP’s were experiencing outages today. FatPipe customers are a lot less vulnerable to these type of outages.

FatPipe products combine multiple data lines from multiple data providers into one single fail proof network. In case, one line fails, the data is automatically re-routed through other available data network providers. Many Fortune 1000 companies and numerous institutions use FatPipe to avoid such a problem.

The FatPipe enabled redundant network provides the following advantages:

99.99+% network redundancy
Automatic fail over of VoIP, VPN, and Thin clients in case a line fails without dropping the sessions
Network redundancy and reliability for a global network
Multi-line WAN optimization and acceleration to maximize data flow including ritualized software for data centers
Automatic fail over to DR sites, without the problems that most cloud services have had when it comes to failing over to a DR site
Smart DNS for in-bound load balancing
For global deployments, there is no need for data provider cooperation as BGP is not needed.

27 Aug

Time Warner Cable Down – Internet Service Disrupted

I woke up to the news that Time Warner Cable backbone had gone down this morning. The report said TWC was handling a large volume of calls from customers. I am not surprised. Connectivity has long moved from the ‘nice to have” column to the “imperative” column. Customers need connectivity for a variety of reasons. I have no doubt business reasons predominate.

Fortunately for my team and myself, FatPipe customers are able to carry on due to the WAN redundancy FatPipe technology provides. While the customers have an interest to get the TWC connection up as quickly as possible – having a redundant connection affords them the luxury of time.

FatPipe’s router clustering technology would have been the perfect foil for this unforeseen event. While admittedly the available bandwidth would be smaller without the TWC connection, the secondary connection allows for uninterrupted connectivity. If you do not have WAN redundancy and were unfortunate enough to use TWC, we at FatPipe are here to assist you with reliability and redundancy solutions.

14 Aug

Internet Routing Storm

Today was a slow day for many internet users. Thanks to the failure of several core BGP routers, Internet traffic was spotty. The reason for this is there were several problems with major ISPs and their routers. Their routers, many of which can hold only 512,000 BGP routing tables, were overloaded and could not handle more routing rules. BGP is the protocol used to track and share routes for sending data traffic. Level 3 was affected in a major way. Those who use VoIP saw a significant degradation in the quality of their VoIP traffic. VoIP is sensitive to jitter and latency; today was the day when all the problems you can think of came to a head.

Those customers who used FatPipe products and had multiple ISP providers did not suffer as much. Using FatPipe SmartDNS on their premise allowed them to escaped the DNS meltdown that occurred at some ISP and backbone service providers. When the core routers were not transmitting the traffic, FatPipe appliances were able to send the traffic to the right place. VoIP traffic was better handled as FatPipe managed the latency and jitter to route traffic in the best possible manner.