Legacy Network – BeyondEdge

Legacy Network Case Study

Corporate Headquarters for a Multi-Billion Dollar International Conglomerate

Our client here was a multibillion-dollar enterprise with a global footprint of independent technology and industrial business units. Their umbrella corporation was exploring options to modernize the campus LAN at their headquarters. A key objective was to move away from their current manual switch management practices and migrate to a cloud-managed environment to reduce operational expenses and improve security. They also required the replacement of a portion of their aging WIFI network with WIFI 6 access points and the addition of 5G small cell radios. The campus consisted of ten buildings and housed over 3,000 employees.

The Problem

Two foundational client requirements for this project were to minimize the supplier costs, both initial and recurring, and ensure minimum service interruption. Additionally, the client wanted any investment to not be stranded when a larger, campus-wide LAN upgrade occurred in the future.

The Challenges

The current LAN infrastructure hardware was not supported by the incumbent vendor’s cloud management platform
Many of the existing, aging access switches did not support the delivery of multi-gigabit port speeds required by the new high capacity 5G and WIFI 6 endpoints
A multimillion-dollar refresh of the entire campus-wide LAN infrastructure was proposed by the incumbent vendor

The Solution

Deployed as an overlay management and orchestration platform, the BeyondEdge SD-LAN solution met the client’s cloud management requirement with zero change to the existing LAN switch hardware. Additionally, the onboarding process was totally hitless to LAN traffic. To support WIFI 6 AP and 5G radio nodes bandwidth needs, high performance, whitebox switches were proposed at select locations in the access layer to deliver multi-gigabit speeds required by these new access devices.

The Outcome

The BeyondEdge SD-LAN solution delivered significant financial savings over a total rip-and-replace of the entire campus LAN infrastructure proposed by the incumbent vendor. The solution also delivered many of the benefits of software-defined networking to their legacy estate including the following:

Reduced Day 2 operational cost by as much as 80% through high levels of automation and simplification
Decreased LAN troubleshooting times by 70% – 90%
Increased LAN uptime by eliminating outages caused by human configuration errors
Improved security with single point of management and Zero-Trust Network Access Control
Deferred “rip and replace” CAPEX spend to be driven by business priorities, not vendor end-of-life dates
Enabled a gradual LAN transformation on a timeline consistent with business needs

The solution resulted in a five-year TCO savings of almost 80%

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