Advanced SD-WAN and expert services combine to drive customer success

When I speak with customers, it’s normal for them to heap praise on Barracuda’s award-winning customer support teams. But until I spoke with CommuniCare’s Director of Network Infrastructure Jeff Brenot and Network Analyst David Temari, I hadn’t heard much about the more high-intensity engagements undertaken by Barracuda Professional Services.

Adopting SD-WAN

CommuniCare is a growing family of companies providing nursing homes, post-acute care, and other health services. They have well over 19,000 employees, distributed among 170 locations in seven states, plus a number of overseas call centers.

As they grew, they found that the high volume of traffic between these sites and their centralized data center using costly T1 and MPLS links, along with backhauling internet traffic through a central breakout, was economically unsustainable.

So they came to Barracuda and were quickly sold on the idea of installing Barracuda CloudGen Firewall appliances at each remote location, putting in place an advanced, secure SD-WAN architecture with many local internet breakouts. Barracuda’s proprietary TINA VPN protocol lets CloudGen Firewall bond multiple ISPs and dynamically balance traffic based on the condition of each link and the priority of traffic types.

“The TINA VPN saves us a lot on ISP costs. It let us replace our old managed MPLS system with much less costly links that TINA optimizes constantly.”

— Jeff Brenot, Director of Network Infrastructure, CommuniCare

Calling the pros for a complex project

That was the easy part. Once their SD-WAN project was complete, it was time to tackle a much more complex and thorny project. They needed to physically relocate their very large data center — without causing any operational impacts to the many regional and global locations that were dependent on uninterrupted connection to critical resources and services, and without changing any IPs.

“We didn’t have the budget to just mirror the whole server farm in the new building. Instead, we had to do it in stages, start up specific services, and then switch a certain number of users over, but not all of them. We had to carefully route their connections to both the new and the old data center. There were a lot of dependencies to be aware of and account for.”

— Jeff Brenot, Director of Network Infrastructure, CommuniCare

Their Barracuda rep suggested they talk to Barracuda Professional Services.

“So, we followed up on that. We had to provide a thorough outline of our project — goals, resources, timeline. All the details and dependencies. And doing that made us very aware of how complex this thing was going to be.”

— David Temari, Network Analyst, CommuniCare

Once they fully grasped the complexity of the job, they were feeling some trepidation — there was very little margin for error. But Professional Services told them it would be no problem, and that confidence rubbed off on David and Jeff.

“Professional Services basically held our hand through the whole process. … Everything went smoothly, step by step. It was complex, painstaking work, but we followed the plan together, and if a problem came up, they went right to work on solving it.”

— Jeff Brenot, Director of Network Infrastructure, CommuniCare

Get the whole story

To get all the details about how Barracuda and Barracuda Professional Services were able to simplify and streamline CommuniCare’s global distributed network — and help David and Jeff successfully pull off a massive data center move — download the full CommuniCare case study. And find out why every level of Barracuda’s support and services organization goes the extra mile to ensure customer success.