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A Manufacturer of Welded Steel Pipes Builds Its Own IT Network with Virtual Pipes
[November 23, 2015]

A Manufacturer of Welded Steel Pipes Builds Its Own IT Network with Virtual Pipes


By Special Guest
Jonathan Harris, Network Engineer, Northwest Pipe Company
 

Northwest Pipe Company manufactures rolled and welded steel pipes that are used for a variety of commercial, agricultural and municipal applications.  The company's manufacturing facilities along with the corporate office and colocation data center for disaster recovery run on IT systems and infrastructure provided by the corporate IT group.  A top priority in 2014 was to upgrade the network that services all of our manufacturing facilities.  The network was made up of failing WAN optimization and server hardware, and outdated software solutions.  These solutions were in such a state that they needed to be completely removed and replaced.  While the company could allocate budget dollars to the projects, the total cost and time involved was forcing tough decisions in prioritization.  If we were going to keep the same network design, we would have to decide which end-of-life products were going to fail first, and put those at the top of the list.  We were not happy with this reactive approach.  So, instead of simply replacing the old hardware and software with newer versions, we decided to step outside the box and consider a new design integrating new technologies in server and storage virtualization and network acceleration.  As a result, we have eliminated the need to replace the physical standalone servers at each of our facilities, increased the protection of our business critical data, and expanded our abilities in network management.  On top of this value, we also realized a cost savings of nearly $1.5 million, over five years.



Northwest Pipe Company is based in Vancouver, Washington, and operates 10 manufacturing facilities across the Unites States and Mexico. Founded in 1966, we have become a leading manufacturer of welded steel pipe. Our Water Transmission business segment supplies large diameter, high-pressure steel pipe products used for water transmission and treatment facilities.  Our Tubular Products Group serves a wide-range of markets, and its quality certified pipe and tube products are designed for a variety of applications including: energy, oil and gas, structural industrial, fire protection, low pressure and agricultural. 

Our data center is based in our Vancouver headquarters facility, and the standard WAN connectivity type has long been MPLS, even as we've changed service providers over the years. While the bandwidth requirements among our facilities varies slightly, each is served by a set of T1 lines. Before we undertook the project to upgrade the network, enterprise applications delivery was centralized from the data center, and plant specific applications, mostly File and Print, ran from their own file servers in each facility. The data center serves as the data application hub, providing services along the spokes to the manufacturing facilities. Those services are replicated to a to the collocated disaster recovery data center. In addition, we have an ongoing effort to converge services over MPLS, by offering voice using SIP Trunking over the existing data circuits.


Our core business applications are SAP (News - Alert) for production, accounting and HR, Microsoft for email and office productivity software, QlikView for analytics and reporting, and we have developed several web-based production applications in-house to support sales, engineering, and plant operations.

The Problems

The initial drivers for upgrading our network were cost control and disaster avoidance. Because we also saw the need for better data management in the future and because we had postponed the maintenance of our infrastructure for a few years due to budgetary constraints, the project was a reactive necessity, as well as a proactive strategy. We faced several immediate problems:

  • Failing WAN Optimization Hardware:  We were running on a failing Cisco (News - Alert) WAAS solution that had reached its end-of-life (EoL). Replacing it with its newer counterpart would have been in the range of $200,000 - $250,000.
  • Over Utilized WAN Circuits:  We were experiencing an increasing over-utilization of our MPLS circuits, particularly in the more remote sites that had less bandwidth. Unfortunately, these are also the sites where bandwidth is more expensive. Adding bandwidth just to the sites would have cost an additional $3,000 - $5,000 per month.
  • Imminent Failure: All facilities were running end-of-life IBM (News - Alert) server hardware and outdated server software. These servers were put in service more than six years ago. Two servers had already suffered catastrophic hardware failure.  Replacing them with updated hardware and software using the same solution architecture would cost us about $160,000.
  • No disaster recovery solution for manufacturing facility systems and data: Added automation and increased integration of systems at our plants, created demands for more production data from the executive group.  The data stored on the file servers outside of our data center required better protection than we had historically been able to provide. If we were to implement a disaster recover focused data replication solution in line with company standards, the initial cost would be about $120,000 for the remote sites, and $30,000 in the data center. We would have also had to factor in the residual cost of bandwidth upgrades to accommodate the additional replication data on the WAN. Depending on the configuration, that could have reached an additional $8,000 -$12,000 per month.
  • Lack of network visibility: Historically we had no comprehensive tools giving us visibility into our MPLS network traffic.  This kind of visibility is critical for capacity planning and problem troubleshooting.

The Solution

On top of the previously mentioned pain points, we have seen an increased use of cloud-based applications, moving us closer toward a 'hybrid enterprise', where we divide application workloads between these applications and those hosted on premises. This change has caused, our network to expand beyond the straight lines between the data center hub to our manufacturing facilities and the DR site.  To address all of these issues we investigated solutions to help us streamline and improve network performance today, and anticipate future needs in bandwidth, data protection, and network bandwidth.

We implemented Riverbed's (News - Alert) SteelHead EX solution that combines WAN optimization with server virtualization for all our manufacturing facilities and the DR site.  This solution accelerates their applications, and keeps them running at peak performance across our MPLS network. SteelHead EX centralizes server management and optimizes bandwidth, while reducing costs, simplifying management and dramatically improving network visibility.

We also implemented Riverbed's SteelFusion converged infrastructure solution to consolidate data storage for all of our manufacturing facilities' onto our data center SAN. Now we can store, backup, and manage all facilities' virtual servers, applications and data in our data center without sacrificing any of the benefits of running branch services locally.

We avoided the cost associated with replacing our EoL Cisco WAAS solution, IBM servers, and the additional bandwidth totalling more than $1.4 million, over five years.  Instead, our solution coast was about $400,000; a 70% reduction.  This represents a huge savings for us.

From a network administration perspective, the much-improved visibility helps us address issues with application performance much faster and more completely. We can see application sessions and know exactly how bandwidth is being utilized.  The IT group can provide a higher level of support and better service to our end users.

Perhaps the most satisfying benefit the IT team has been realized in the silence from the company executives.  When things run as expected.  There is nothing to talk about. When the feedback we get is just a smile, that's a great thing. 




Edited by Kyle Piscioniere

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