Vapor IO: Re-architecting the Internet

by Jordan Baker | Feb 21, 2023 | Case Studies, Consolidation, Pillar 1 - Data Center Infrastructure Management, Pillar 2 - Critical Remote, Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP)

Automating edge deployments & lights-out management for Vapor® IO

Vapor IO provides autonomous network and data center infrastructure at the network edge. Their goal is to re-architect the traditional Internet into a distributed, ubiquitous, edge-to-edge web that serves end users with SLA-backed routing, up to twelve-nines reliability, 100-microsecond latency, and terabits-per-second bandwidth.

With 36 (and counting) major U.S. markets, and their recent expansion into Barcelona, Spain, Vapor IO needs to run operations as lean as possible. However, as they continued to scale, the complexity of their own management infrastructure stood in the way of achieving this goal.

See why they required eight hours of setup time at each site, and discover which Nodegrid technologies helped significantly streamline not only new installations, but operations and overhead as well. Download the case study for full details.

Download the full case study

Problems and Gaps

Vapor IO’s ultimate goal for operations is to deploy lights-out data centers all over the world and minimize the number of staff required to maintain these sites. Crucial to this goal is having the ability to collect billions of data points at each location, which allows teams to monitor and control physical and virtual devices. But their existing management infrastructure was complex and outdated, and consisted of:

Cellular modem with third-party
Subscription out-of-band router
Out-of-band switch
Out-of-band serial console
Out-of-band laptop/compute node

One of the company’s core values is to further business goals by making constructive changes and avoiding unnecessary complexity. This management infrastructure only added complexity and would require additional staff to maintain it. To solve this, Vapor IO would have to be proactive in closing several significant gaps:

Each edge data center required at least five separate management devices that were not integrated together. Deployments required a skilled technician to be on site for an entire workday. This time sink would multiply in direct correlation to the total number of new sites to deploy.
The ability to lease rackspace directly translates to revenue. But each site required Vapor IO to use at least 5RU for its own devices. As demand increased, this dead space would translate to millions in lost revenue, on top of additional power and cooling costs.
Having disparate solutions not only increased the total points of failure, but also meant more devices to manage. This increased the likelihood of failures/outages that would require truck rolls, and also increased the ongoing operational workload required to keep many management devices running.
A multi-vendor environment meant added overhead and rigidity that complicated procurement, project planning, and development of new designs. This made it difficult to adapt to different use cases and customer requirements.

Solution

Vapor IO deployed the modular Nodegrid Net SR. This appliance provided the capabilities they needed to automate deployments and support lights-out management. The LTE module allows staff to remotely connect to sites and bring resources online, while the SFP module allows each site to connect to their nationwide fiber backbone.

“Nodegrid keeps our costs down and extends everyone’s capabilities. The automation lets our support teams do specialized jobs, so our engineers can devote more time to delivering customer value.” — Frank Basso, EVP of Operations, Vapor IO

Download the Case Study

ZPE Cloud – Silver Peak and Palo Alto Networks Edge Deployment

by ZPE Systems | Aug 16, 2022 | Pillar 2 - Critical Remote

Want to know how to set up a Silver Peak appliance and Palo Alto Networks firewall? In our latest video, Director of Solution Engineering Rene Neumann walks you through how to easily create an edge platform using the Nodegrid Gate SR and ZPE Cloud.

This hardware and cloud platform gives you:

SD-WAN capabilities, allowing you to simultaneously connect to Ethernet, fiber, and cellular
Enterprise-class firewall, allowing you to secure all traffic into and out of your edge site

These Silver Peak and Palo Alto templates are available to all customers, and make it easy to deploy and configure virtual machines necessary for edge sites.

Get a hands-on demo

Want to see how easy this is to deploy in your environment? Click the button below to set up a one-on-one demo with Rene himself.

Get a demo

Reliable Infrastructure for the Internet Association of Australia

by ZPE Systems | Aug 12, 2022 | Case Studies, Pillar 1 - Data Center Infrastructure Management

The Internet Association of Australia, or IAA, operates an Internet exchange network that provides peering, virtual leased line (VLL), and cloud access services throughout Australia, with a goal to create better, 100% reliable Internet for the country. Internet peering is the building block of what makes up the Internet, and is critical for businesses, public organizations, and individuals to connect to valuable digital resources. This means the proper critical infrastructure must be in place to support the growing demand for everything from web hosting, to education, video streaming, gaming, and the myriad of other digital services.

But for IAA to keep up with their performance targets — which aim to provide 100% availability and 900Gbps speeds during peak times — they must sustain their infrastructure with frequent improvements, updates, and modernization efforts. This means constantly evaluating which equipment supports their goals, and which equipment holds them back.

IAA’s existing network management solution reached end of life and became the focal point of this dilemma. With 35 distributed locations containing Arista, Cisco, and Extreme Networks, and Juniper equipment, not to mention numerous server resources, IAA required a new network management solution that could provide fiber connectivity and true lights-out management to keep their infrastructure operational around the clock. This involved overcoming the following obstacles:

Achieving a true out-of-band management network separate from the production network, to provide management access in case of routing errors
Providing a fully remote virtual presence at all 35 points of presence
Providing remote upgrades to network switches and servers, with the ability to remotely recover from failed upgrades, configuration problems, and human error
Running tools locally for packet capturing and troubleshooting
Enabling automation for fast deployments and reduced human intervention

IAA addressed their problems by deploying the Nodegrid Net SR and Nodegrid Gate SR. Read the full case study using the link below.

Read the Full Case Study

Need Help Replacing Your End-of-Life Gear?

ZPE Now Offers a Complete Products & Services Solution

Discontinued console servers from popular vendors pose a major security risk. Learn about ZPE Systems’ latest package that brings Synopsys-validated, Gen 3 out-of-band to your environment, with all the work done for you.

Explore EOL Replacement Package

Making Deployment and Management Easy for a Large Retailer

by ZPE Systems | Jul 12, 2022 | Case Studies, Pillar 2 - Critical Remote

Simplified retail edge & critical remote access

Making deployment and management easy for a large retailer

A major retail company requires networking that can keep up with demand. However, having large distribution centers and enormous showrooms can push the limits of their connectivity. Internal operations rely heavily on data for logistics and inventory purposes, while customer-facing interactions need strong networking for product availability and order processing transactions. To accommodate rapid business growth, the retailer sought a branch networking solution that they could scale quickly and manage easily.

The Challenge

With traditional edge solutions deployed, the company became accustomed to high support & maintenance costs. However as business began to increase significantly, expansion became critical — but their existing system could not keep up.

The Solution

The company discovered that only Nodegrid could deliver the capabilities they needed for rapid growth. They chose a powerful combination of Nodegrid Services Router (SR) devices: the Net SR (NSR), Gate SR (GSR), and Link SR (LSR).

The Results

The combined Nodegrid solution streamlined the company’s edge networks along with their management efforts.
Instead of requiring a separate switch in the MDF and a dedicated cellular device in each IDF, the retailer needed only the NSR in the MDF. This all-in-one device eliminated the network switch and centralized these critical functions while extending capabilities to each IDF. Connecting the LSR or GSR at the department level also reduced their stack by eliminating the need for purpose-built cellular appliances throughout each store.

Read the Full Case Study

HEAnet: providing network uptime for education

by Jordan Baker | Nov 15, 2021 | Case Studies, Failover Connectivity, Increase Productivity, Out of Band Management, Pillar 2 - Critical Remote, Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP)

If there’s one sector that relies on network uptime more than ever before, it’s the education sector. For both in-person and virtual learning, students and staff connect to crucial resources around the world to share information. The infrastructure that enables this connectivity is critical, and in the country of Ireland, this infrastructure is deployed and maintained by HEAnet.

As the national education and research network, HEAnet is a provider who must adhere to stringent service levels in order to keep entire education communities online. But they recently faced a few major challenges as their out-of-band (OOB) management solution neared its end-of-life (EOL) date. This system was crucial to maintaining network uptime, as it gave engineers remote access to their 50+ nationwide locations. They needed to quickly roll out a new solution, but they were faced with a second challenge — limited staff.

It seemed HEAnet was stuck between a rock and a hard place. They would surely need to outsource the job, and that’s when they turned to Rahi, the world-renowned MSP who introduced them to ZPE Systems’ Nodegrid.

The rest is history, and for a deep dive into that lesson, download the full HEAnet case study below.

But before you do, here’s a quick refresher on critical infrastructure and why network uptime can be difficult to maintain.

Critical infrastructure and network uptime

Critical infrastructure is made up of the systems that connect sites to each other and to the rest of the world. The data center is an obvious example of where critical infrastructure is deployed. Points-of-presence (POPs) and colocations are other somewhat obvious examples. All of these house components, such as servers, switches, and routers, which are essential to handling data and traffic that organizations rely on.

Here are more examples of where critical infrastructure is commonly found:

Warehouses: servers, routers, and Wi-Fi access points help humans and their automated counterparts track inventories, fulfill orders, and communicate with vendors.
Manufacturing plants: operationalized technology like sensors and IoT devices collect data from gauges, robots, and machining equipment to ensure accurate measurements, maintain quality control, and streamline fabrication processes.
Cellular base stations: compute, storage, and failover devices process signals, store data, and provide backup connectivity for critical cell site components.

Organizations must maintain high levels of network uptime for their critical infrastructure, since it supports the lifeblood of everything they do. But this can be a challenge because these components are not always located within convenient reach of skilled engineers.

Why can network uptime be so challenging to maintain?

Maintaining network uptime can be challenging even for fully-staffed locations. This difficulty is amplified — quite dramatically — when organizations have to recover and maintain sites that are located far off the beaten path.

Imagine this: you’re responsible for monitoring and troubleshooting critical infrastructure for a network of college campuses in your region. One of your most remote sites, which serves more than one thousand students and faculty on any given day, experiences sudden disruptions and eventually goes offline. It’ll take close to four hours for you to put skilled staff on site to recover the network, which puts you at risk of breaching your SLA. You and your team are stressed out and scrambling, while students and teachers have no option but to cancel some or all of their activities.

Now imagine that you have a tool that allows you to respond instantly and restore the network before anyone even notices. That’s the kind of power you can achieve with a deep, robust out-of-band management solution, which is one of the tools HEAnet deployed to keep disruptions from reaching users.

There’s more that can go wrong, however. Your sites could suffer an ISP outage, leaving locations in the dark if they don’t employ any wireless backup connections. Or if your customer has a multi-vendor MSP solution that you’re part of, the other vendor’s components may be to blame, and you need a tool that can help you quickly diagnose the root cause.

Download the HEAnet case study

To see more challenges you might face when maintaining network uptime, download the HEAnet case study. You’ll also discover how Nodegrid gave them seamless backup connectivity and allowed a single Rahi engineer to deploy two sites in a single day. Get the case study now.

DigiCert: improving critical network infrastructure for 50% less work

by Jordan Baker | Sep 29, 2021 | Case Studies, Pillar 2 - Critical Remote

Critical network infrastructure drives business. Like a system of roadways, it determines how efficiently communications move to and from your organization. This affects everything such as the speed of customer banking transactions, to the reliable access IT support teams have to maintaining enterprise resources.

The problem is, complexity can easily bog down your critical network infrastructure. When this happens, user experiences can lag at ATMs and checkout lines, and IT teams can be cut off from providing off-site support. When you’re a company such as DigiCert, who serves nearly 90% of Fortune 500 companies, slowdowns and failures simply aren’t an option.

In this post, we’ll discuss some of the challenges of critical network infrastructure, and show you why DigiCert chose Nodegrid to streamline operations.

Critical network infrastructure challenges

One of the overarching challenges to critical network infrastructure is the volume of complexity. When you have several data center locations and many branch sites distributed globally, even a little bit of complexity can scale out of control. So what contributes to this? Having so many devices and solutions.

For DigiCert, every location required a large stack of essential devices. These included servers, switches, routers, out-of-band hardware, and cellular failover boxes. Managing these proved slow, as each came from a different vendor and had its own management protocols and interface. When support tickets came in, backlogs mounted as teams struggled with Mean Time To Innocence (MTTI) and root cause analyses. Licensing, updating, and maintaining their most important systems was a major time sink at the data center and branch. In short, DigiCert’s critical network infrastructure was demanding too much time and too many resources to be sustainable.

This inflated infrastructure also brought more points of failure, which were difficult to pinpoint and resolve. DigiCert lacked a centralized management solution, so they had to devote more effort to troubleshooting whether the current issue lied within a bad server configuration, an overheating device, or a faulty router.

The company also lacked peace of mind regarding remote out-of-band management access. Occasionally, support teams would be unable to troubleshoot and resolve problems remotely. This typically resulted in on-site visits to the data center, where the only solution would be to gain direct console port access to specific devices. This only added to their IT burden and grew the complexity of their operations.

How Nodegrid radically improved DigiCert’s critical network infrastructure

Eliminating critical network infrastructure complexity can seem like a daunting bridge to cross. Consolidating your physical infrastructure can be an enormous task all by itself, much less implementing centralized management and reliable out-of-band.

But for DigiCert, ZPE Systems’ Nodegrid and ZPE Cloud made it simple to achieve all this — while helping the company maintain an impenetrable security posture. They were able to deploy multiple services on a single Nodegrid device, which reduced their hardware footprint by a 4-to-1 ratio. They hosted their Palo Alto security solutions directly on the Nodegrid appliance, and set up 4G/LTE for connection redundancy. In total, they achieved a redundant configuration by using two Nodegrid devices at each location, instead of the 6-8 that they previously required.

To learn more about this implementation, download the full case study. You’ll explore the all-in-one Nodegrid solution that exceeded DigiCert’s requirements, slashed their workload 50%, and helped them achieve near 100% network uptime.

ZPE Solution Pathways

Discover Nodegrid