Silver Peak SD-WAN Central to RNDC Revamp

Who says, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”? When a company that is nearly 120 years old and a leader in its industry says it’s time to modernize, I’d say this dog has a number of tricks up its sleeve. This week, Republic National Distributing Company (RNDC) – the country’s second largest distributer of premium wine and spirits – announced the completion of its project to modernize IT infrastructure, with Silver Peak’s SD-WAN serving as the special sauce.

Silver Peak (News - Alert) deployed its Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution across RNDC’s 60 locations, standardized on EdgeConnect virtual appliances at each location to ensure the company can keeps its eye on revenue and the bottom line by ensuring site uptime objectives are met, employees are continuously connected to business applications and improved business responsiveness. 

“We’re extremely pleased to complete our strategic IT modernization initiative and to standardize on two MPLS and two LTE (News - Alert) carriers along with new compute systems and WAN/LAN interconnects across all of our 60 locations spanning 23 states,” said Roderick Bethly, network architect, Republic National Distribution Company. “Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect will help us to advance toward our ultimate objective of achieving 6 9’s availability across all sites and connecting employees to applications with the reliability, security and performance we need to drive our business forward.”

RNDC weighed its options carefully when looking into the project. First delving into what Citrix and Cisco (News - Alert) had to offer, but turned its favor to Silver Peak because of its single integrated system and seamless WAN optimization integration. Oh, and not to mention the cost involved – with one of the above requiring a complete infrastructure upgrade at each location. And the other did not support the distributor’s new standardized compute system.

“Republic National Distribution Company is harnessing the full power of EdgeConnect to classify and accelerate business-enabling applications to deliver a superior user experience edge-to-edge, while dramatically lowering costs and simplifying IT operations,” added Silver Peak SVP and CMO, John Vincenzo (News - Alert). “EdgeConnect provides RNDC with the performance, flexibility and control they need to align their WAN resources with business mandates to achieve availability objectives and enhance business agility and responsiveness.”

SD-WAN is showing it has real staying power. And with it comes increased flexibility and performance while minimizing on spend. Software continues at every turn to prove its worth as a worthy replacement to rigid architecture of years past.  RNDC is reaping the reward of embracing this burgeoning technology, and if they can modernize their ways, why haven’t you?