The company connects its offices with a frame relay WAN, which it buys as a managed service through MCI. While the pipe has proven reliable, in recent years, increasing bandwidth demands have put a strain on it. In the past, overseas facilities had no connectivity to other regions and ran their manufacturing applications locally on small Unix servers. But when the company began connecting those offices through VPNs and sharing applications globally, demand surged.
This affected application performance, yet Johnson Controls had no way of determining which applications were gobbling up the most bandwidth. In the meantime, the company began centralizing, moving away from its practice of running multiple versions of critical applications, with different offices and regions having their own deployments. Now users around the world connect to an office in Milwaukee to run PeopleSoft Inc. apps for human resources, benefits, and payroll, or to Germany to run SAP financials.
To solve its bandwidth problems, last summer, Johnson Controls started using nGenius Performance Management from NetScout Systems Inc., a device that's controlled by Web-based software. The system shows how programs behave, identifies network bottlenecks, and helps the IT staff determine where it can prioritize and optimize traffic. The system has helped identify potential problems before they occur, preventing downtime and data loss, and has paid for itself by reducing the amount of time spent on the network, Schoeppel says.
To increase bandwidth capacity, Johnson Controls added new frame relay pipes and VPN-tunneling services. In the coming year, Schoeppel says, the company will spend significant time and resources on the deployment of new Multiprotocol Label Switching-based connections. Services based on that standard connect sites in a redundant web of links, offering more resilient communications than point-to-point frame relay architectures. Those connections should make it possible for Johnson Controls to eventually achieve its cost-saving goal of converging voice and data on one network.
There are plenty of other businesses facing global network challenges. Schoeppel's advice? "The biggest mistake you can make is assuming that you're going to have the same kinds of problems as here in the U.S.," he says. "You have to personally go out to these regions, spend time there, find out what the challenges are. There just is no substitute for having your own feet on the street and your own eyes on the problem."
--David M. Ewalt
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