Fighting your way to a network that flies

Establishing and maintaining a WAN (wide area network) from the UK shouldn't be a problem should it? Certainly not just over Europe? And definitely not when it only needs to touch Paris, Frankfurt and Milan, all of them thriving commercial centres? That's what Gems Sensors, based in Basingstoke, thought. But after trying it, persevering, and finding not so much the technology, but the practicalities and technical language issues a total nightmare, it changed its mind, turned to managed services – and has never looked back. Gems Sensors makes level, flow and pressure sensors, mostly for aerospace and military applications like the Euro Fighter, but also for industry and particularly the process sectors. At $130m, and part of the $5.5bn international Danaher Corporation, the company is not small. But like many in manufacturing, it runs a very small IT department, focusing its attention primarily on its core business – manufacturing, in this case quite specialised and very much configure- and engineer-to-order, with no two sensors being alike. Paradoxically, it is the specialised nature of Gems' manufactured products that originally drove the firm to start a project to set-up connections with its sales offices in France, Germany and Italy. Mike Powers, Gems' technical director, says the firm wanted to improve on its sales order processing and thus also customer service across Europe, while also centralising other business and IT operations. Before direct digital connection, orders from Europe involved a lengthy and time-consuming paper trail of faxes, emails, phone calls, entering data onto the firm's Exel ERP system, more calls and faxes, confirming valid combinations, generation of order acknowledgement and so on – all of which could result in delays of more than a week. "We needed to be able to transact live with our European sales offices," says Powers. Nightmare scenario Sounds like a simple proposition, and initially the firm went for dial-up ISDN lines point-to-point, starting with France and Germany. "In theory it was great. The bandwidth was fine at 64k, and it was adequate technically. But the assumption we made was that we would be connected, and with Paris in particular, that was a nightmare especially during mid morning and post lunch. We found ourselves having to micro-manage the line: spending 30 minutes a day getting connected and then keeping it running all day, with international charges, to ensure we didn't lose it. Otherwise the routers would just come back indicating 'line busy'." It was so problematic that the link to Italy was never established. Although there were cost implications in terms of unnecessary connection charges, Powers says they were trivial compared to the quality of service issues and the time wasted in the IT department. "Users also complained about a degradation in performance when they migrated from their LAN [local area network] to our dial-up systems," he says. And there was the European time difference: the firm couldn't transact for the first hour of every day's business. "We needed something more reliable," he says. "Our first thought was to go for a VPN [virtual private network] tunnel through the Internet using IPSec. We had a 2Mb link out through ADSL [broadband] in Basingstoke, managed for us by Via Networks, so that was fine at this end. But the problem then was the local telcos: language problems when you're trying to establish technical details like what protocols you want to run, what security, what encryption, what refresh rates…" He makes the point that although the European offices are staffed by nationals – and they're technical – they're not IT people. It rapidly became clear that a DIY approach using ADSL and a local systems integrator wasn't going to be a runner. Powers was also being advised that ADSL isn't reliable enough – although Gems' own experience was nothing but excellent. "It's dirt cheap and if we've had more than an hour down in the last three or four years I'd be surprised." Getting connected Enter Via Networks: Powers talked to the software and service provider about the dilemma, and found that it had its own network running through France, Germany and Italy, coincidentally very close to Gem's offices. It also had its own presence – with IT-proficient nationals. "It was a perfect fit," he says. "But they were also nervous about ADSL for mission-critical operations," he adds. So Gems went for dedicated local leased lines to connect to Via's network at the European locations. "They're short links so relatively inexpensive." Leased lines (256k in the UK and 64k links for the regional offices) with managed Cisco routers provided the IP connectivity. The VPN was implemented through a WatchGuard Firebox 700 at the Basingstoke head office and WatchGuard Soho firewall appliances at the European offices. Each satellite office now connects through secure VPN tunnels to the Unix server running Exel in Basingstoke, not only for sales order processing, but progress chasing and stock checks, as well as MRP and financial reporting. That was it technically, but Powers also went for Via's managed service. He says that although going for a managed WAN doesn't make a lot of cost difference, "it saves all the hassle and means that our limited IT resource is more sensibly and usefully deployed." Powers is unequivocal: "You'd be mad not to take some sort of service for your external network," he insists. Indeed, he argues that, for many, the same may well apply to their LANs. Unless you have a decent in-house IT team, you need a third party at least to run the upgrades, installation, network performance audits, health checks and so on. "We use Garandale: they research the equipment and quote to our specification; we buy; they install; and we look after. That works very well. " He says he considered getting the firm to provide the 'look after' element too, using remote systems. "But about 50% of the issues we have are the 'sillies' where someone has pressed the wrong button. You really need someone on hand to solve those kinds of problems." Meanwhile, the next phase of WAN development will be extending Gems' VPN to its external sales force. Remote access to Gems' systems is increasingly important, with the company using online tools for collaboration on R&D and sales.