Mid City
Mid-City Supply was spending a tremendous amount of money on their carrier-managed private line services. While the service was relatively stable, it left Mid-City with little flexibility in managing the service themselves. If a location’s private line service was down, there would be no backup service in the event of a failure, which brought that location’s business to a halt. This event would result in lost time, profit, and energy. Mid-City needed a solution and they needed it fast. They got it thanks to Van Ausdall & Farrar.
THE COMPANY
Mid-City Supply Co., Inc. provides Michiana area contractors & homeowners with the highest quality Plumbing, HVAC, Refrigeration, PVF, and industrial products. Mid-City Supply’s well- trained and friendly associates allow Mid-City’s Partnership Philosophy to deliver the best value-added services in our markets while maintaining competitive wholesale prices. Mid-City was significantly over-spending on their carrier-managed private line services.
Though the service was relatively stable, Mid-City had very little flexibility in managing the service themselves. If a location’s private line service were down, the outage would bring the business to a halt due to a lack of backup service.
THE OBJECTIVE
Mid-City’s current system left room for improvement in their wide area network (WAN). Van Ausdall and Farrar’s specialist team was called in to evaluate their systems and find areas they could modify for improved performance. Mid-City has relied on Van Ausdall and Farrar’s Unified Communications experts to support their Mitel phone system for over ten years. Given the world-class service experience they receive in that area of their business, it was a logical choice to bring in Van Ausdall and Farrar to consult on their wide area network (WAN) needs.
THE STRATEGY
The core of Van Ausdall’s solution was to deploy Fortinet “FortiGate” next-generation firewalls at all Mid-City locations to provide security at the edge while also extending a vast SD-WAN feature set into their corporate WAN. In addition, Van Ausdall and Farrar took a very consultative approach to find the very best fit in evaluating primary and secondary internet connectivity for each individual location. This approach would enable Mid-City to have increased control over their operations and services in their network, decreasing the cost, while actually improving the overall quality and availability of services.
THE RESULTS
Van Ausdall and Farrar’s team of engineers worked to design, engineer, and support an SDWAN solution to replace legacy MPLS and private line networks for Mid-City. This solution resulted in a much more robust solution and delivered drastic savings in monthly carrier service fees. On top of increased savings, Mid-City Supply was given enhanced administration and control of their own network, improved analytics, and a much more survivable network fabric overall.
