Internet slowness and falls typically impact business productivity. Although this scenario is very well-known nowadays, the solution is not always to buy technologies
With the mission of identifying the reasons for a poor entire network environment performance, and mainly addressing failures and declines in voice calls and e-mail traffic, BAT British American Tobacco Argentina at Martinez’s with the NAP IT consultancy.
As an initial step in this project, NAP IT professionals applied methodologies such as Network Assessment and Tuning to map the technologies between the units in Argentina. Understand the case, from diagnosis to solution, and learn why often investing in more modern technologies is not what provides high performance to the environment.
Network environment analysis
The long-distance network (WAN) connection devices mapping between Argentina’s sites and BAT’s MPLS network identified a loop effect that was caused by the way the technologies were connected and configured.
The Internet connection failures (WLAN) analysis found conflicts in the routers configuration, generating packet discards and consequent degradation in the internet quality to the users. In order to solve the faults, the configuration was changed so that the technologies realized the auto-negotiation of its speed.
Results in numbers
The solution consisted in the devices configuration correction, through the Network Tuning methodology. After these changes, Internet connections were normalized and no discard was detected at the interface. Soon, the communication tools began to be used with greater effectiveness and efficiency.
“With the resetting, the average traffic optimization jumped to 65.7%, with peaks of 97.7%. Before, the average was 28.4%, with a maximum peak of 56% optimization”, says Nap IT Network Engineer Gustavo Emerim. According to him, another important point was the increase in traffic volume, jumping from 69.6 GB to 92.6 GB, considering the same time.
Knowledge and technical experience are decisive
The Nap IT team knowledge and experience in applying the appropriate methodologies to a network environment were determinant to increase the company connectivity and communication performance. Therefore, it was not necessary to invest in new equipment.
In summary, in addition to solving situations that directly impacted BAT Argentina’s productivity and business results, the staff involved in the project made important recommendations for the company’s entire communication and data infrastructure management and maintenance. Based on good network management practices, the Nap IT team benefited the customer with performance gain.
