CASE STUDIES SALTON EUROPE

Salton benefit from European-wide VPN

Background

Salton Europe are a leading domestic designer, marketer and distributor of a broad range of branded, high quality small appliances under such well recognised brand names as Russell Hobbs, Haden, Salton, George Foreman Grills, Tower and Juicelady. These products have the leading domestic market share in indoor grills, kettles, toasters, and a significant market share in other product categories.

They also design and market tabletop products, clocks, lighting products, personal care, haircare and wellness products under such brand names as Carmen, Mountain Breeze, Pifco and Westclox.

In the UK they sell their products through specialist retailers, department stores, grocery retailers, electrical retailers, catalogue shops and mail order companies.

With annual turnover in excess of $1 Billion worldwide the European head office is based at Failsworth in Manchester.

Problem

For a world-wide company, like Salton, good communications are vital in ensuring continued business growth. With mainland Europe offices located in Paris, Milan, Barcelona and Nuremburg, it is vital that there are reliable and fast communication links between these sites and the head office in Manchester.

The company uses SAP globally for its financial and reporting systems and it is important that all the sites are able to access the SAP and other corporate services systems, such as validated Internet access, via a fast, secure, reliable and inexpensive infrastructure.

The Paris office connect using a leased line, and while this provides the level of performance required, it is an expensive option and restrictive in terms of the length of the agreement that must be committed to. Similarly, Manchester has both a 2Mb leased line and a 2Mb ADSL line, although only one can be used at any one time.

Salton had reached the point where their infrastructure needed to be upgraded to support the increased reliance on electronic communications and the number of physical offices located across Europe.

Solution

The company initially looked at the option of leased lines to directly connect the sites, but the costs for this proved to be extremely high. In addition the inflexibility of the long agreements that had to be signed in order to activate the service was also a problem.

After deciding not to pursue this route the company approached Nviron, who carried out a thorough analysis of their requirements before recommending a solution.

Nviron recommended the implantation of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to link up all the sites with the head office and each other. VPN is an overall term that refers to all the technologies that enable secure communications over the Internet - including authentication, encrypting, and tunnelling.

This solution was based on the StoneGate multi-link VPN system, with a high availability corporate firewall at the head office and smaller units for the branch offices. The multi-link technology provides high availability and load balancing for Internet and VPN traffic across many different ISP’s.

The implementation of the system enabled Salton to replace its expensive leased lines with low cost ADSL lines at the branches, while the head office is served by 2 higher capacity lines. These are now utilised in a high availability/load balancing configuration that provides failover protection, ensuring Internet connections are always available.

With centralised management, drag and drop configuration and a built-in active traffic filter to protect mobile users, the StoneGate system automatically maintains the fastest possible link to the Internet and eliminates Internet connection as a possible point of failure, without the use of complex routing protocols or additional hardware.

The entire solution was configured and managed under Nviron’s NTrust service. This allows an organisation to gain the benefits of increased bandwidth by consolidating multiple circuits into a dynamically balanced data path where fastest route selection is handled transparently via fully managed N Trust gateways provided by Nviron.

The overall benefit is to provide a secure and standardised solution that is replicable, scalable and reliable. For Salton, if further capacity is required it is a simple task to seamlessly add another low-cost line (from even a different ISP) to the existing infrastructure. Similarly, if any of the European sites were to require high availability/load balancing in the future the installation of another low-cost line can be easily added, with the system able to balance the communication over the infrastructure.

Frank Klischat of Salton in Manchester commented:

“The NTrust solution based on the StoneGate VPN has enabled us to dramatically reduce our infrastructure costs on leased lines, while at the same time increasing the availability and quality of the service.

The flexible architecture of the infrastructure enables us to increase capacity and locations quickly and securely without having to pay the high costs associated with leased lines.

The solution has provided us with a secure infrastructure which will support the business as we continue to expand over the coming years.”