Case Study
U.S. Grocery Retailer Takes Advantage of a
Lower Cost MPLS Alternative
Hughes delivers fully-redundant architecture and
increased throughput.
Companies with retail and distribution locations
spread across large geographic areas often have a
hard time pulling together connectivity solutions that
can satisfy all of their needs—especially when budget
concerns enter the picture.
This is especially true as more bandwidth is
required for new sophisticated transactions and Web
applications. Companies often patch together a mix
of solutions. Add on layers of partner and supplier
communications that need to be addressed, and the
picture is even more complicated.
How a Large U.S. Regional Grocery Retailer Made
Some Choices
Consider one of Hughes’ customers, a large regional
food retailer in the Northeast United States. They
needed to transition from an older infrastructure
to a broadband solution that could handle their
high data traffic requirements. The company had
growing demands with respect to POS, credit, and
transactional data. They were also layering on more
robust business applications that required broadband
connectivity at each of their distributed locations.
The retailer knew they needed bigger pipes, better
availability, and improved reliability—at a reasonable
cost. However, the options presented by various
vendors confounded their efforts. During preliminary
technology evaluations, they found that no one
technology could cover all their stores…except for
T1. However, T1 across their whole chain would be
too expensive. A local telephone company proposed
using dark fiber, but the grocer discovered that
solution would only cover approximately 25 percent
of their locations (supplementing with T1 coverage to
the other stores would drive costs way beyond their
budget threshold). They investigated 3G wireless as an
alternative for backup, but that didn’t perform to their
satisfaction.
This retail chain needed a comprehensive solution,
from a single vendor—something that would not take a
lot of oversight and management from their end.
Circling Back to a Trusted Partner
The company had been a Hughes customer previously.
They were happy with Hughes’ services for the
previous 10 years, and they were familiar with the
people, processes, and the professional services
group in particular. Although happy with Hughes as
a company, they felt their existing satellite network
could not provide the bandwidth and application
performance they now needed. Once they started down
that path, they quickly realized that they couldn’t
get all their requirements covered with one solution
provider. The company circled back to Hughes to see if
they had anything new to propose beyond the standard
satellite solution currently in place.
Case Study
Hughes proposed a blended approach providing
primary coverage via DSL at most sites and fractional
T1s to cover the rest of the locations, and secondary
redundant coverage via Hughes’ broadband satellite.
The resulting price from Hughes was significantly
lower than other options, and the customer could get
everything done with a single vendor. Hughes was able
to provide comprehensive service for all their network
management needs.
The complete engagement included network design,
application performance testing, planning and
implementation as part of the managed network
solution Hughes provided the customer.
A Deeper Dive: What Did This Company Get for Their
$$$?
This particular Hughes customer received a lowlatency, high-bandwidth network solution by deploying
two broadband connections to each store: a DSL
path in parallel with a redundant satellite broadband
connection. It’s a fully-backed-up solution with more
than enough throughput to handle their transactional
and business application needs. The solution also
provides a fully-managed service from one provider
and a consistent/reliable/tested set of technologies
(as opposed to mixing vendors and technologies). This
service—Hughes High-Availability VPN—is designed to
provide many of the benefits of an MPLS network, but
at a much lower cost.
The company did not have to choose between
“broadband with limitations” or “MPLS with cost overruns.” They enjoy:
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More bandwidth and better application performance
Dramatically enhanced network reliability
Robust security
Low cost
No-cost Hughes professional services that got them up
and running quickly
„„ A trusted, long-term partnership
As a result, the company protected revenue streams
and operational performance while increasing
bandwidth and bolstering security. The solution also
provided ample opportunity for growth and plenty of
flexibility.
Professional Services: Design,
Implementation, and Support
Specialized Hughes support teams deliver network
design, application design and optimization,
and systems integration services with every new
project. These are costly add-ons with traditional
integrators.
The following consulting and support services are
offered as part of a total network deployment:
„„ Network architecture design, integration, and
optimization
„„ Remote configuration
„„ On-site maintenance
„„ Monitoring and support
„„ Enhanced network management
„„ 24/7 customer support
„„ Enterprise-class SLAs
LAN-like Performance over the WAN
The Hughes High-Availability VPN solution delivers
LAN-like performance over the WAN. It uses a
symmetrical architecture approach for bandwidth
control and acceleration. Enterprise-class routers are
deployed at each remote location, providing WAN
optimization for:
Application Prioritization and Traffic Shaping: With the
growth in remote applications as well as recreational
traffic, demand for WAN bandwidth often exceeds
available bandwidth at branch sites. Instead of
traditional traffic engineering approaches that attempt
to manage traffic levels, a more efficient method is
to use prioritization to ensure that business-critical
applications are provided preferential access to WAN
bandwidth. The Hughes solution provides four priority
levels. Traffic flows are classified via a variety of rules,
such as application type, TCP ports, or IP addresses.
Application Acceleration: Protocol acceleration is an
effective method for delivering excellent application
performance by minimizing or eliminating the effects
Case Study
of latency and jitter on commonly used protocols. TCP,
for instance, is susceptible to significant performance
degradation due to well-known issues such as slow
start and window scaling. While these have no userperceivable impact on LANs, their effect becomes
more pronounced in WANs. Hughes incorporates
both TCP and HTTP/HTTPS (Web and secure
Web) acceleration functionality into every Hughes
enterprise-class router. No expensive and complex
third-party appliance or service is required. Application
acceleration occurs transparently to the end user
application systems.
Data Reduction: Data reduction refers to the decrease
or elimination of redundant data over the WAN. The
technique delivers significant benefits in terms of WAN
bandwidth efficiency. Hughes has incorporated two
forms of data reduction to maximize these gains—
compression and protocol overhead removal. Both
are transparent to the end systems. Stateful, contentaware compression provides lossless compression
gains of up to 10 times, depending on the actual
traffic content.
As a result, Hughes customers enjoy the performance
and cost benefits illustrated below.
Comparison of T1 VPN and High-Availability VPN
Criteria
T1 VPN
High-Availability VPN
Bandwidth
1.5 Mbps
1.5–5 Mbps*
Availability
99.8%
99.9–99.99%
Managed Enterprise-Grade Service Delivery
Yes
Yes
Security
Via private network and network-based
security
Via security access router, data
encryption, and network-based
security
Class of Service
Typically 4–6, with one real-time class
4 data classes
Multicast Support
Limited
Fully scalable
WAN Optimization
Overlay service with external appliance
and additional cost
Built-in, no additional cost
Cost
$400–$800 monthly per site
$200–$400 monthly per site
*Multiple access links to each location, including benefits of WAN optimization.
Case Study
Low-Cost, High-Performance Connectivity: The Key to
Enterprise Growth, Efficiency, and Profitability
Companies that rely on WAN VPNs need extremely
reliable, high-performance connectivity in order
to keep revenue flowing, customers satisfied, and
operations running. These communication links are
especially crucial for distributed enterprises in the
retail, financial, hospitality, and insurance industries.
As your business applications outgrow the capabilities
of existing WAN connections, you need to upgrade
network performance while improving overall reliability,
availability, and security. And you need to keep costs
low.
Hughes’ solutions offer MPLS-like performance as
part of a managed network service at prices more
comparable to broadband VPN. With Hughes, you
don’t have to sacrifice performance and availability for
cost or vice versa.
The Hughes High-Availability VPN solution is already
successfully providing services to a number of leading
distributed enterprises. In all, over 150 enterprises
with more than 250,000 sites rely on Hughes to meet
their mission-critical private network requirements.
Hughes ranks as a top three IP VPN provider in the
United States, alongside companies like AT&T and
Verizon.*
Hughes Experience and Leadership—Second to None
Nothing beats experience when it comes to meeting
complex communications challenges. For over
30 years, Hughes has led the market in satellite
technology, innovation, and service. Now, with
combined landline and wireless platforms and singlesource management, Hughes Managed Services
takes networking to the highest level and empowers
companies to achieve seamless connectivity, extend
their reach, and expand their competitive horizons.
*Vertical Systems Group 2008, US IP VPN Service Site Share.
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permission of Hughes Network Systems, LLC, 11717 Exploration Lane, Germantown, Maryland 20876.
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For additional information, please call 1-866-251-2795 or visit enterprise.Hughes.com.
©2010 Hughes Networks Systems, LLC. Hughes is a registered trademark of Hughes Network Systems, LLC.
All information is subject to change. All rights reserved.
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