| Royal Pet Supplies communicates
with its 12 remote sales offices like everyone’s in the same
building
Challenge
Royal Pet Supplies, a leading distributor for more than 50 years,
needed communications technology that could expand and accommodate
their rapid customer growth. And because the company operates with
numerous out-of-sate sales facilities and warehouses, they needed
to improve intra-company communications to ensure customer expectations
were satisfied.
Royal Pet wanted to eliminate communication barriers and enhance
its ability to service customers. To start, they replaced an old
legacy mainframe computer (connected to dumb terminals) with a new
scalable, high-performance computing server (connected to desktop
PCs) to run its mission-critical applications. Then, to provide
uninterrupted access for its remote sales offices, Royal Pet enlisted
NacTel to design a new frame relay system that would replace it
many dedicated and costly point-to-point 56Kbs circuits. The new
network would also have to include route diversity and disaster
recovery, so Royal Pet could ensure continuous communications regardless
of failure, as well as guard against viruses, intruders, hackers
and other data culprits.
Solution
NacTel’s solution involved equipping Royal Pet with a Virtual
Private Network (VPN).
If a failure occurs anywhere in Royal Pet’s frame relay virtual
private network, all of its remote sales offices, currently 12,
can immediately re-establish contact through another VPN that uses
the public Internet. With the new server, Royal Pet now has full-time
Internet access. The remote sites dial-up through an Internet service
provider, but communications with the main site are achieved via
a secure, encrypted connection.
Backup between New York and Royal Pet’s out-of-state distribution
centers needed a different approach. With such a large amount of
transmitted data, NacTel determined the public Internet wouldn’t
meet the quality of service requirements. Royal Pet routinely transmitted
large volumes of data. Instead, NacTel installed a dial-up ISDN
line, a 128Kbs digital circuit that provides superior service quality
with consistent reliability.
NacTel president, Jamie Buswell, said "We didn’t put
all their eggs in one basket." To emphasize route diversity
and ensure Royal Pet wouldn’t be too dependent on any service
provider, we helped them implement a fiber optic T-1 connection
from Royal Pet to the Internet. This way, they have two separate
networks and each has a different carrier, ensuring a much-higher
degree of reliability.
Benefits
A disaster recovery plan is like an insurance policy: one hopes
it’ll never be needed. But even before Royal Pet’s new
system was complete, the tragic terrorist attack on the World Trade
Center also destroyed a nearby fiber-optic center, along with Royal
Pet’s main network cables.
Fred Hall, COO at Royal Pet, explained, "When the fiber optic
cables were destroyed, our network automatically switched over to
the new backup system within moments and we literally never missed
a beat. We get over 500 customers each day placing orders for about
37,000 different products, and most depend upon next-day delivery.
Because the system stayed intact, we didn’t let our customers
down and prevented a considerable amount of revenue from being lost."
Fred Hall commented, "We now have all our technology in place
– computer system, frame relay network, backup systems and
security. We couldn’t have gone very far with our old system.
We can now do things we never dreamed possible."
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