The company considered pumping up the bandwidth at its U.S. sites, but at the time, Seminis had no surefire way of guaranteeing or monitoring QoS on the fatter pipes. "There was no way to measure or give certain apps priority," Ackerman explains.
Configuring QoS on Seminis' Nortel ARN (advanced remote node) routers didn't help, either. The ERP application had so many ports associated with it that it was actually inefficient to configure the older, low-end ARNs with the QoS parameters.
"We put HTTP Port 80 traffic at a lower priority over the WAN, but this didn't entirely solve the performance problem," Ackerman says.
So Seminis went with the WAN optimization appliances, which made defining applications, grouping traffic and allocating bandwidth easier, Ackerman says. Seminis runs Peribit's PeriScope CMS (Central Management Software) to configure and monitor compression and QoS.
But not all of Seminis' sites can get WAN compression and QoS. The Budapest and Tapioszele, Hungary, sites, for example, are connected over a serial link. Tapioszele accesses the WAN through a Nortel ARN router in Budapest, where there's also a Peribit Sequence Reducer. Because Tapioszele traffic goes straight to the ARN router via the serial link and doesn't touch the Peribit box, it doesn't get compressed, nor are the apps prioritized with QoS.
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