Swift Electrical Wholesalers

Swift Electrical Wholesalers (SOT) Ltd., one of the UK's most trusted kitchen appliance distributors, recently purchased an Xrio Load Balancer for its locations in Stoke-on-Trent, Fenton, Andover and Falkirk. With this purchase, Swift Electrical expanded its Internet connectivity, improved its resiliency and quadrupled its connection size without increasing its costs.

Business Challenge

For 30 years, Swift Electrical has provided efficient, flexible service to independent electrical retailers, home-builders and kitchen studios throughout the UK mainland. Ten years ago, the National Distributor, which prides itself on the support it provides to independent retailers, enhanced its operations model by distributing its trade sales, order entry and dispatch printing to its 3 distribution depots, located throughout the UK. This Unix-based back-end system was connected via leased and EPS9 lines.

When Swift Electrical upgraded to a new back-end system three years ago, IT Manager Mark Kelly, decided to switch from expensive, bandwidth-restricted leased lines to cheaper ADSL services. As throughput across each of the sites' single ADSL lines increased however, so did time-outs and delays. As the situation deteriorated, Kelly knew he needed to move to a higher speed, higher capacity link. The company chose an SDSL radio solution for communications between the Head Office in Stoke-on-Trent and their Central Distribution Depot in Fenton. This arrangement worked for a short time, but occasional downtime on the part of their Internet Service Provider became more frequent and more crippling each time it happened. "When our provider went down, we went down," said Kelly. Kelly wanted to find a less expensive, more resilient solution. SDSL services could provide the bandwidth and ADSL services could offer the lower cost, but neither could provide the multi-provider resiliency that Swift Electrical needed.

When Kelly looked at load balancing options, he found plenty. "There are lots of free load balancers out there that run through Linux boxes. They're nice. And free. But they're not 100 percent. With no support, they're not really up to the job," said Kelly.

"I looked at ISP's for load balancing services too, but the costs of those services were high. So then I started asking the ISP's what they use to do the job. They kept saying Xrio, so I went to Xrio directly."

The Solution

Swift Electrical's primary concerns were resiliency, capacity, cost and providing connections for all of their locations. When he began talking to Xrio, Kelly saw immediately that the Xrio's Load Balancers offered Swift Electrical everything they were looking for in a load balancing solution. "We don't tend to outsource anything at all. The UBM gives us the control to do as we want, however we want."

"With the Xrio's Load Balancer, I have 8 ADSL lines at our main site that provide more bandwidth than the two SDSL lines I’m replacing, and for a lower monthly cost." said Kelly. Cost is not the only consideration for Swift Electrical, though. With their distributed ordering, printing and customer support, uptime is a primary concern. When the Internet connection is down, Swift Electrical is cut off from a major part of their business. With the resiliency offered by the Xrio's Load Balancer, Kelly doesn't need to worry about that. "I can lose multiple ADSL lines, but, its not going to take us down."

Kelly deployed the Xrio load balancer at the Stoke-on-Trent location and smaller Xrio load balancers at the Fenton, Andover and Falkirk depots. "Xrio Load Balancers gives more network status visibility than sitting in the server room and watching for lights flashing on boxes would. It's brilliant, just in what it's given us on the general web browsing side. You can see what's happening on your external network."

Swift Electrical is in the process of deploying multi-point VPNs between its main location and the other depots. Kelly is looking forward to the implementation. "It gives us the satisfaction of knowing that things will work all the time. The remote depots won't be affected even if individual lines fail," said Kelly. "Xrio's Load Balancers has helped us put resiliency in place. It's also easier to implement the devices than it is to implement standard ISDN or dial-up backup options for ADSL."

The Results

As a result of deploying the Xrio Load Balancer WAN solution, Swift Electrical enjoys dramatically increased bandwidth, true resiliency, and better network management capabilities for less than the cost of their previous solution.

The Load Balancers also provides an intuitive, easy-to-configure administrative interface. "It's nice and easy." says Kelly. "Everything works. It's easy to understand. Plug it in, set it up and away it goes." Kelly also discussed one helpful feature of the Xrio Load Balancers' administration. "One of its nice features lets you change the configuration and view it, but you don't have to apply the changes until you're ready – until you're sure."

Kelly concludes, "I would definitely recommend Xrio's Products. A device like this allows you to implement multi-ADSL lines and it's cheaper than keeping single SDSL lines. Xrio Load Balancers have given us increased bandwidth, resiliency and VPN stability across four sites, for less than what we were spending on SDSL lines at just two sites."