Cloud Upgrades for Plastic Injection Molding Manufacturer

The customer contacted Solace with multiple issues.

Background

They had problems with accessing the on premise Exchange 2010 from inside the local network via wireless. The amount of available server space only allowed for 100MB per mailbox. They also had intermittent problems with all wireless devices losing connectivity. Administrators had a very manual/unreliable way of administering wireless connection clients. Slow internet connectivity and aged firewall cause extremely slow speeds when connecting to the internet. The client needed a scalable way to monitor and manage content filtering, current solution was per machine / per user. The client also needed a more reliable backup solution that automate offsite backups of servers. The last thing the client had as an existing issue was they were running out of active IP addresses.

 

Solution

The solution was designed to eliminate their current on premise Exchange 2010 environment with Office 365 Exchange Online. The customer also wanted to take advantage of Yammer and Lync. For wireless, we replaced 16 aged Motorola access points with Meraki MR34ac units. As for increasing Internet traffic Eastridge Coordinated a WAN connection upgrade to AT&T fiber and install a new Meraki MX80 Firewall with content filtering. Eastridge implemented Storage Craft Shadow Protect on all servers. Eastridge reconfigured the current IP address configuration to allow for more addresses.

 

Benefits

The benefits this customer has seen are greatly improved since the implementation. Moving all users mailboxes to Office 365 gave them the ability to connect any device anywhere without getting prompted for certificate errors. This also gave them some freedom by giving them a full 50GB mailbox per users so they did not have to constantly archive using PST files.

Upgrading the wireless to the Meraki MR34 802.11ac units increased speed, coverage and reliability. The end user is no longer having issues with handheld wireless scanner dropping off and causing delays in production. The wireless upgrade also provided the ability to have a true Guest network that can be monitored and managed easily from one location. This also provided better security to sensitive network data.

Coordinating the internet upgrade with AT&T to put them on 30MB fiber is one of the largest improvements. The users are able to surf the web with greater speed and not have issues with latency. Implementing the Meraki MX80 has given them the ability to utilize content filtering based on Active Directory group membership. They also now have the ability to monitor all clients and the bandwidth that is being consumed. A monthly report is sent to the administrator with a summary of data usage by device and user.

All Server backups are now being backed up using imaging technology to a local server that Eastridge provided. These backups are executed on all servers hourly and send to the local backup server. These backups are rolled up and replicated to Eastridge Cloud storage for offsite disaster recovery.

Eastridge changed current IP address scheme to allow for over 1000 additional network addresses. This allowed us to segment out DHCP clients from statically addressed clients. Where in the past they had done this with exceptions to the current DHCP pool.

Client: Plastic Injection Molding Manufacturer

Focus: IT Infrastructure, Manufacturing, Office 365

Date: March 2017

 

Challenges

Lack of mobility
Aging equipment
Slow speeds
Inconsistent connectivity

Solution Highlights

Azure Based Virtual Machines
SSD hosted application storage
Remote Desktop to Azure
Session Hosts
Azure AD connect
Windows 10 Professional

Result Highlights

Mobility
Speed
Security

Cloud Solutions Utilized

Office 365 E3
Azure
Azure AD
Dynamics CRM