The connectivity of a UK national retail chain is managed by an IT consultancy firm. all of the outlets are setup in the same way with cable and DSL internet connections and a leased line service connecting to the head office. A project was undertaken to improve connectivity as many of the outlets suffer with intermittent connectivity that frequently requires the broadband modems/routers to be restarted by staff. Access to a remote VPN service was required to fail over between the main cable connection and a backup ADSL.
They also wanted better monitoring and alerting and some form of configuration management of the chosen router device.
A pilot store was chosen, and FB2900s configured and installed with the help of FireBrick staff, this replaced the existing router solution. The Configuration on the FireBrick managed the three WAN connections and L2TP tunnel to the VPN provider.
The pilot went well, and over the course of 2018 other stores over the UK are being upgraded to the same solution.
The profiles and monitoring features of the FireBrick came in to their own with monitoring the WAN connections and identifying faults.
Due to each of the retail stores having very similar network configuration in terms of subnets, devices and WAN connections, rolling out configuration files for each FireBrick was very easy. The client scripted the generation of XML configuration which they applied to the FireBrick and archived.
Extensive use of routing tables to manage the various WAN and VPN connections
Profiles used to fail over connectivity
L2TP tunnels to remote service provider
Firewall and NAT extensively used
(All the network diagrams on these case study pages are very rough representations and are not an accurate representation of live networks)
