Background
Headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, Gilbarco is a leading supplier of fuel dispensing equipment and fully integrated point-of-sale systems for the global petroleum marketplace. The company traces its corporate history back to 1865, with its current brand in place for nearly 80 years. Gilbarco maintains manufacturing and research and development centers in the U.S., Germany, Italy, UK, Argentina, Brazil, China, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as relationships with authorized distributors, service contractors, and affiliates in more than 100 countries. Its fueling, merchandising, and payment management equipment and systems for convenience and grocery stores, mass
merchandisers, and retail fueling sites worldwide produce annual sales in excess of $650 million, and support a customer base that includes major oil companies, large truck fleets, car rental companies, airports, package delivery companies, government agencies, public utilities, and thousands of retail fueling chains.
Approximately 4000 employees are responsible for the development and support of Gilbarco’s ISO 9001:1994 standards-compliant solutions. These personnel are based at 25 locations internationally, with larger sites the home to as many as 1400 individuals, while smaller sites are staffed by as few as a handful. A wide-area network (WAN) ties these facilities and people together, along with a myriad of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and home-grown applications that enable employees to work productively.
The task of designing, deploying, and supporting the network and applications infrastructure falls to Gilbarco’s 75-person, global information systems department (ISD). Monitoring, managing, and maintaining the performance and integrity of the WAN and applications in operation is the responsibility of ISD’s network security team, a group of 7, with 4 in the U.S. and 1 in India. Keeping this infrastructure running smoothly is vital to the execution of day-to-day activities and to allowing the company and its customers to stay a step ahead of the competition.
Getting to the root of routing and bandwidth utilization problems
Gilbarco’s WAN primarily utilizes Cisco routers and virtual private networks (VPN) tunnels to promote safe, reliable communications among constituents worldwide. To assess the state of the WAN, and to identify and address problems, the network security team relied on a combination of COTS and freeware tools (including NMIS, Rancid, and Smokeping), all of which offered limited troubleshooting capabilities. The tools were adequate for raising bandwidth management and system alerts, providing the high-level functionality to respond to them, but correlating information across multiple products had to be performed manually. In some cases, the tools offered complementary capabilities, while in
At a Glance
Industry:
Petroleum/energy
Location:
Greensboro, North Carolina
Network Type:
Multi-site network
Challenge:
Gilbarco’s network security team is tasked with monitoring, managing, and maintaining the corporate WAN, which spans 25 sites worldwide, supports a myriad of applications, and delivers service to 4000 users. Armed only with a limited collection of tools the team was mired in a persistent reactive mode.
Solution:
Gilbarco deployed Visual Performance Manager to replace the gaps and overlaps of its existing tools with a single solution that correlates network, server, and application information globally.
Results:
“The availability of real-time and historical information lets us isolate and resolve straightforward issues like incorrect and asynchronous routing with speed, accuracy, and confidence. More importantly, it has empowered us to tackle more subtle and complex challenges, such as the impact of applications on bandwidth utilization and the performance of our WAN internet service provider partners. We are clearly spending less time responding to reported anomalies and more time identifying potential pitfalls and strategically planning for the future.”– Chris Billings, Senior Network Engineer, Gilbarco
Gilbarco Fuels Network, Server, and Application
Optimization with Fluke Networks’
end-to-end WAN performance, the depth to analyze performance across all layers of the WAN, the flexibility to review real-time and historical information through powerful graphical user interfaces and reports, and the scalability to deliver all of this functionality as our network footprint, applications, and users continued to grow in size and scope.”
In this performance management by committee environment, the network security team faced an uphill struggle to react to straightforward bandwidth management problems quickly and stay ahead of trouble reports submitted by users – much less turn their attention to detecting and resolving more sophisticated, complex network, server, and application performance issues. To help overcome these challenges, the team deployed Visual Performance Manager from Fluke Networks in 2007.
Minimizing the impact to the current operating environment was critical, so the network security team opted for a gradual implementation of Visual Performance Manager. Gilbarco’s Billings says, “Initially, we rolled out the new solution to the 8-10 largest sites and focused on improvements to bandwidth management, including subtle utilization issues like inefficient and incorrect routing that could encumber the network and cause needless delays. This approach paid immediate dividends for our team and the users we serve.”
In one instance, traffic from a site in Germany to a site in Italy exhibited slow response times, a problem the team would have had difficulty pinpointing with its existing tools. Using Visual Performance Manager, the team viewed bi-directional source/destination address pairs for all traffic into and out of the routing path, ultimately tracing the source of the problem to an indirect route. Traffic that was supposed to flow directly between the site in Germany and the site in Italy was instead traveling first to a site in Argentina, creating a latency noted by users. With this information in-hand, the team understood exactly what they needed to do. They changed the route and response times quickly returned to normal, allowing users to work more productively.
Another example of an underlying routing-related degradation came to light as the network security team set out on an in-depth investigation of WAN performance. The team had previously purchased and deployed a WAN optimization product at 7 remote sites, but was uncertain whether it was delivering on its promise of traffic reduction from the local area network to the WAN. When the team called on Visual Performance Manager to help them make this assessment, they discovered the peak usage of a VPN tunnel into their Netherlands facility was overloaded, while the peak usage out was 0 percent – a definitive indication of asynchronous routing between 2 endpoints.
According to Chris Billings, “The ramifications of asynchronous routing are significant in our environment. Not only would network and applications performance be negatively affected, but the WAN optimization product would be unable to optimize traffic – the very confirmation we originally had been seeking. With Visual Performance Manager, we had the capabilities at our fingertips to drill down into the network, identify the impacted source and destination addresses, and implement the appropriate corrective actions, restoring peak performance and allowing the WAN optimization tool to do its job. Thanks to Visual Performance Manager, we could resolve bandwidth utilization and routing anomalies like these more rapidly, accurately, and decisively than was possible with our existing tools, empowering us to use the solution to more confidently confront broader and deeper performance issues.”
Assessing the impact of applications on network performance
Attacking bandwidth utilization and performance issues from a routing perspective was a fine start and delivered quantifiable value, but was merely the tip of the iceberg. The Gilbarco WAN supported a wide variety and high volume of custom and COTS N-tier applications that were far more likely to be the primary culprits of poor WAN performance. Prior to the arrival of Visual Performance Manager, the network security team lacked the ammunition to cohesively assess the impacts of these applications on the WAN and its users, placing the network at risk.
For instance, the team struggled to conclusively determine the source of spikes in bandwidth utilization when routing wasn’t the obvious cause. With Visual Performance Manager, they had the wherewithal to look back over time to find bandwidth spikes and examine traffic during each spike all the way down to the content level – an unprecedented capability. Analyzing the spikes over an extended time period with this level of detail led the team to an interesting discovery: a connection between a group of spikes and network backups. The team subsequently modified the backup’s business process and eliminated the problem – justifying the value of the solution to ISD and corporate executives.
Reining in service provider partners
When Gilbarco’s network security team identified anomalies, it couldn’t always determine if the issues were purely internal or involved one or both of its WAN Internet service provider partners, nor could the team confirm the accuracy of carrier reports generated by its partners that tracked Gilbarco traffic loads.
The result was a pair of shortcomings. First, partners could lay the blame for problems on one another or Gilbarco without fear of retribution, opening the door to finger-pointing, delaying problem resolution, and creating relationships that lacked trust. Second, the team could not validate its partners’ service invoices, which meant the providers might not be meeting their service obligations and Gilbarco might be overpaying for services received.
Visual Performance Manager enabled the network security team to assess the performance of its WAN Internet service provider partners in real-time and over time, with clear, concise graphical displays and reports, which improved communication with the partners and fostered a cooperative approach to problem solving. In addition, the solution helped the team conclude not only that the carrier reports it was receiving were indeed accurate, but also that they pointed to an imbalance of traffic loads between the partners, which could impact performance and cost over time. Chris Billings says, “Because of the information we could obtain with Visual Performance Manager, we are better positioned to strategically plan our commitments to our partners and project future traffic loads for improved results and value.”
Transforming operations
Visual Performance Manager from Fluke Networks is providing the ISD organization’s network security team with a comprehensive solution that is changing the way they do business. Whereas the legacy environment consisted of a collection of tools that did little to illuminate the performance of the global WAN, the breadth and depth of functionality in Visual Performance Manager is enabling the team to isolate and resolve even the most subtle and complex network, server, and application anomalies far more rapidly, accurately, and confidently – saving time and money, and providing a return on investment management cannot afford to ignore. With each passing day, the team is spending less time responding to reported issues and more time proactively detecting and addressing potential problems before they impact users.
Figure 1: Visual Performance Manager’s “interface” view of Gilbarco’s Netherlands facility clearly showed asynchronous routing through a VPN tunnel, setting the stage for the network security team to drill down deeper and identify the affected endpoints.
Just as significantly, the configuration and execution of the new solution hasn’t burdened the team or the network. Gilbarco’s Billings concludes, “Installation and configuration of Visual Performance Manager took less than half a day, and network devices only required 3 commands to initiate their communication and reporting, which means the solution will be able to scale easily as our footprint continues to grow. The flexibility of the product’s user interface has allowed members of our team to customize displays to correspond to their job functions, requirements, and preferences, dramatically raising everyone’s productivity.”
The case for Visual Performance Manager has been clear-cut. The network security team is enjoying improved relationships with service provider partners and the user community, while justifying their activities and plans to ISD and senior executives. Users can count on more reliable and efficient WAN and application operations, allowing them to focus on their business-critical missions – keeping Gilbarco at the forefront of the global petroleum marketplace.
About Fluke Networks
Fluke Networks is part of Danaher Corporation, a growing Fortune 500 company and leading manufacturer of professional instrumentation, industrial technologies, tools and components with revenues of more than $11 billion (USD) annually. Our technology offerings are used by major carriers including AT&T, Global Crossing, Sprint, Verizon Business and others to run their managed services. Our global reach of sales offices, laboratories, factories, and home and retail environments spans six continents and more than 50 countries and gives customers the peace of mind that they made the right choice in partnering with Fluke Networks for all of their Performance Management needs.
Contact Fluke Networks: Phone 800-283-5853 (US/Canada) or 425-446-4519 (other locations). Email: [email protected].