Providing Out-of-Band Connectivity to Mission-Critical IT Resources

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Mercado Livre & ZPE: Ensuring Uptime for Latin America’s E-Commerce Backbone

ZPE Systems – Mercado Livre case study
Mercado Livre, Latin America’s largest e-commerce and fintech platform, powers over 148 million users with online shopping, payments, and logistics services. With more than 200 sites across the region, uptime is critical; a single minute of downtime can delay shipments, stall payments, and impact customer trust.

The challenge? Only 25% of sites have dedicated IT staff, making outages costly and time-consuming to resolve. Internet or data center link failures can bring down core applications, while misconfigurations on key devices can take up to a full day to fix. Mercado Livre needed a way to simplify management at scale, ensure business continuity, and avoid expensive on-site interventions.

By adopting ZPE Systems’ Nodegrid platform, Mercado Livre gained LTE-based out-of-band connectivity, secure failover to data centers, and centralized cloud management. The result is stronger resilience, faster recovery, and fewer truck rolls — or in other words, turning uptime into a competitive advantage for Latin America’s digital economy.

Key outcomes:

  • Business Continuity: Shipments and payments keep flowing during outages
  • Fast Recovery: Remote fixes prevent 24+ hour downtime
  • Efficiency: Faster deployments and fewer on-site visits

“Everyone on-site was amazed. The built-in LTE automatically took over and distribution carried on like normal. The ZPE solution paid for itself with just this one outage.”  –  Evandro Soares Correia, Jr. – IT Admin, Mercado Livre

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Gruve: Delivering Mission-Critical AI Services with ZPE’s Out-of-Band Management Platform

Gruve is a global AI services company, serving customers in Data Sciences, Cybersecurity, Customer Experience, and many other verticals. Their approach is simple: focus on the customer’s business, financial, and technical objectives, and tailor a solution that delivers measurable outcomes. To achieve this, Gruve has invested heavily in GPU clusters, high-speed cluster networks, and flash storage platforms.

The challenge for Gruve is operating this infrastructure. GPU disruptions or failures can have a cascading effect on training workloads and even jeopardize compliance. Resolving these issues with traditional solutions can take hours and require on-site human intervention. With strict SLAs in place, even minutes of downtime can have a significant impact on business.

Gruve required a solution that could help them react instantly as well as monitor their infrastructure in real time to perform proactive maintenance and management. Read the full case study below for full details on how Nodegrid and ZPE Cloud helped them:

  • Resolve connectivity and hardware issues in minutes without going on-site
  • Ensure ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliance without service disruptions
  • Allow IT staff to focus on revenue-generating initiatives instead of maintenance visits

“We rely on ZPE Systems’ Nodegrid to help us leverage the value of our AI Cluster investments. The Nodegrid platform gives us full visibility and adaptability as we build new AI solutions for customers and partners.”  –  Matt Robinson, CTO, Gruve

Gruve Case Study – Mission-Critical AI Services

Lower Costs, Greater Resilience: Supporting Business Continuity For A Leading Asian Retailer

A leading retailer in Asia, who serves beauty and wellness products across the region, needed to address the growing complexity of their infrastructure. As they scaled, it became increasingly difficult to manage critical functions that edge sites relied on. This put business continuity in jeopardy and hindered their ability to quickly open new revenue-generating locations.

That’s when ByteBridge, one of ZPE’s trusted partners, proposed a solution only achievable by deploying Nodegrid. Read the full case study to see how this uniquely tailored management architecture delivered benefits like:

  • Streamlined ops: Monitoring, remote access, power management, and more from a single portal.
  • Lower TCO: Combined serial, Ethernet, 4G into one compact Nodegrid device.
  • Wireless resilience: Automatic cellular failover for continuity during primary internet outages.
ZPE Systems – ByteBridge and ZPE case study

When Every Branch Matters: How a Credit Union Reinforced Network Resilience

When Every Branch Matters: How a Credit Union Reinforced Network Resilience

For many credit unions, digital transformation has expanded well beyond core banking systems. They depend on resilient IT infrastructure for everything from interactive teller machines, to cloud-hosted apps and remote employee access. But for their IT teams, this brings a growing list of challenges: more branches, more network equipment, and more pressure to minimize downtime. And often, they need to solve these challenges without adding staff.

That’s where the cracks begin to show.

One mid-sized U.S. credit union faced a similar dilemma. They had to support more than 200 branch locations, but with only two IT staff. Routine network issues meant spending hours in the car, sometimes just to power cycle a device. Troubleshooting tasks or regular firmware updates easily consumed entire workdays. Combating outages was even worse because they lacked a reliable management path outside of the primary network. Long outages meant long workdays and lots of stress, not to mention the customer-facing issues like lost trust and reputation damage.

But instead of patching the problem, they made a bold move.

They adopted Nodegrid and ZPE Cloud, the out-of-band management solution that enables complete visibility and control, even when the main network fails. For the credit union’s IT team, this enabled them to perform all their jobs – from provisioning to troubleshooting, to device reboots – via remote session. The results? Drastically reduced travel costs, faster incident response times, and peace of mind knowing that every branch was protected by a resilient management backbone.

Download the full case study to see how they transformed their branch operations and set the foundation for secure, scalable growth.

Credit Union case study thumbnail

Living Spaces Furniture: Scaling to 50 sites with only 3 network staff

Collapsing the stack and centralizing management helps Living Spaces accelerate scaling across the U.S.

Blake Johnson – Living Spaces Furniture Network Architect

“We’ve quadrupled business, but Nodegrid is actually shrinking our workload, especially as we implement new automation. It’s a gamechanger for network folks. Period.” — Blake Johnson, Network Architect, Living Spaces Furniture

Living Spaces is a prominent furniture retailer in the United States. Their store locations include large showrooms, where customers can view furnishings for indoor and outdoor spaces, and plenty of warehouse space for storing on-hand inventory. These locations must serve customers with responsive shopping experiences, which depend on the network infrastructure.

Increasing demand helped Living Spaces grow out of its home state of California, into states including Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and others. Their out-of-band infrastructure was crucial to spinning up new locations and maintaining operations. But they faced a significant problem: this infrastructure was incredibly complex and costly, requiring many dedicated cellular and out-of-band devices at each location. See why their three-person network team needed a solution that could:

  • Reduce costs and eliminate the need for $300,000 per year in SIM contracts
  • Reduce workloads and risks, by centralizing management and minimizing entry points
  • Accelerate deployments by allowing automation

99.999% Uptime for a Top-10 Engineering School

Providing low-level remote access and automation saves hundreds of hours per month for the university’s small IT team

One of the largest universities in the United States fosters academics and research for nearly 40,000 students, staff, and researchers. The university sits among the top 10 schools for engineering, and heavily integrates technology into all disciplines, including engineering, computer sciences, and agricultural studies.

The university received a grant to expand, update, and connect their network of campuses, while enhancing infrastructure and mobility, resiliency, and campus amenities.  But having more than 200 on-campus buildings presents a challenge. The campus is home to academic facilities as well as a hospital, airport, 60,000-seat sports stadium, and dozens of leased spaces for local businesses. This makes the university equivalent to a small city, and its network infrastructure is what keeps it all connected.

Their small IT team was responsible for maintaining more than 10,000 management devices, most of which were long past EOL and frequently failing. They needed a refresh, but with a solution that could also reduce the hundreds of hours they spent every month on travel and on-site work. To maximize their day-to-day efficiency, they required a solution that could overcome these operational gaps:

  • Reducing the 100-150 hours of monthly travel times, by giving engineers the ability to fully access their stack remotely
  • Reducing the 80-120 hours of monthly on-site work required to maintain the 99.999% SLA, by automating manual jobs such as patching and firmware upgrades
  • Expanding their management headroom and use-case adaptability, by migrating to IPv6 and reducing the existing 6RU device stack

Download the full case study to see how ZPE’s Nodegrid hardware and software solved these problems.

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Problems and Gaps

The university is one of the largest in the United States. It sits among the nation’s top 50 schools for research expenditures, and heavily integrates technology into all disciplines, including engineering. Its main campus is home to more than 200 buildings that sit on over 2,500 acres of land. The campus is essentially a small city, and the university’s network infrastructure keeps it all connected.

This network infrastructure, however, was well beyond EOL and in disrepair. But rather than simply upgrade to newer devices, the university’s small IT team wanted to improve the overall quality of life well into the future. This meant addressing three gaps:

  • Inefficient management at scale — Each engineer spent an average of ten hours per month on travel alone, just to traverse the campus’ wide footprint and get to each MDF/IDF closet.
  • Too much focus on ops — The aging infrastructure was on the brink of collapse and required each engineer to spend eight hours per month in on-site work, just to keep devices running.
  • Too many devices — The infrastructure includes roughly 10,000 devices to manage, which was exhausting IP on their limited IPv4 network and too rigid to fit in tight spaces, like their remote farm closets and research labs.

Solution

The university deployed the full lineup of Nodegrid devices, including the Nodegrid Serial Console, Nodegrid Services Routers, and Nodegrid Manager. These allowed them to overcome all three gaps using remote management, automation, and consolidated functionality, to save engineers hundreds of hours every month. Download the full case study to see the complete solution and benefits.

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