FM Logistic is an international logistics company, an expert in logistics, road transport and transport and logistics services. The company offers comprehensive warehousing solutions and has been delivering goods at the right time, to the right place, for the benefit of all its customers since 1967.
The customer of the project is the Russian division of the company.The Russian division of FM Logistic used the services and equipment of a foreign telecom operator and equipment manufacturer to provide communications between data centers, offices and logistics complexes.
SD-WAN technology was used to provide communications and other network services, which allowed for flexible traffic management (prioritizing traffic of critical applications, ensuring reliability using inexpensive communication channels, etc.) and provided a tool for quickly resolving incidents and analyzing traffic, etc.
Nevertheless, the customer needed to completely replace the service and equipment of foreign suppliers, while maintaining the functionality of SD-WAN technology and reducing the cost of owning a distributed data transmission network.
The customer faced a number of challenges:
• High criticality and importance of the infrastructure for the business, where the loss of communication with key sites would lead to the cessation of the main activity.
• A non-working network would be equal to the cessation of business not only of the logistics company, but also of its clients.
• The operation of solutions from different vendors was very difficult, since the equipment and technologies of different manufacturers were incompatible somewhere, but at the same time they had to work with an unchanged SLA).
• It was important to maintain the basic principles, high level of quality and service established by the global team.
That is why the customer chose ICL Services, the first Russian company that completely migrated the working infrastructure of a foreign vendor to the domestic SD-WAN solution.
Key Challenges
- Ensuring continuity of FM Logistic business processes in Russia
- Reducing the risks of operating imported equipment by seamlessly switching to import-independent data transmission network solutions
- Reducing FM Logistic's costs by transferring non-core activities to external suppliers using a service model
At the start of the project, the following was given:
• 38 logistics centers in different regions, 2 data centers.
• High level of fault tolerance – duplication of key devices.
SD-WAN was chosen as the main technology of the project – a joint solution from ICL Services and its partner, which had a number of advantages:
• High connection speed of sites
• High SLA, up to 99.9999
• DDoS protection
• Russian-made product, use of domestic hardware platforms
• Management and monitoring in a single console
• Simple integration of security solutions
• High quality of data transmission on channels of different types
Preparation
Before the implementation of the solution, a pilot was conducted, demonstrating the capabilities of the technology, demonstrating the possibility of seamless switching and proving the operability of the product specifically in the customer's infrastructure.
To ensure uninterrupted and secure communication, the ICL Services team went beyond the SD-WAN product and participated in all the necessary activities to provide a high-quality service in general.
Together with the customer's team, engineers and architects worked with cloud and Internet providers, data centers (DC) and other external contractors of the customer to coordinate actions and develop the "right" architecture.
Switching of remote sites was carried out during a period of minimal user activity. No changes were made for users and business applications, switching was unnoticeable. All configurations repeated the current architecture as much as possible.
A hub was created connecting the "old" and "new" segments. At the time of switching the site, changes were made at the level of the global infrastructure and the new local infrastructure based on SD-WAN.
Switching
The full cycle of switching sites consisted of two stages:
• Stage 1 - preparation, unpacking, configuration of physical and virtual devices, their registration in the central management system.
• Stage 2 - migration of the site to the new infrastructure and exclusion of traffic from the old one.
Instructions and detailed steps and "playbooks" for all participants were developed and constantly adapted. This allowed us to achieve high speed of switching sites.
The SD-WAN technology and developed playbooks allowed us to use specialists without network engineer qualifications at remote sites without reducing the speed and quality of migration.
Controlled fault tolerance tests were also conducted. Fast and automatic switching to backup channels and devices were demonstrated.
The infrastructure successfully coped with DDoS attacks during migration and subsequent operation. Mechanisms for protection against uncontrolled switching between channels under attack were configured.
Communication channel monitoring was configured and integration with the customer's ITSM system was set up. Priorities and response times for sites were determined.
In addition, during the implementation, the ICL Services team, together with vendor experts, discovered and corrected a number of integration and functional shortcomings of the product. The complex and atypical architecture of the customer made it possible to identify points for modernization and functional improvement of the SD-WAN product. The functionality was quickly supplemented, and during development, workarounds were used transparently for FM Logistic without loss of quality.
Products and technologies
- SD-Wan
Results
- Localization of the solution and protection of the company from sanctions risks with a reliable supplier from the Russian Federation.
- The “network as a service” model allowed us to reduce capital expenditures.
- Opportunities have opened up for further expansion of services in the field of information security (cybersecurity as a service).