Packeteer® (NASDAQ: PKTR), the global leader in WAN Optimization systems, announced on May 22nd that Mary Kay Inc., one of the world's largest direct sellers of skin care and color cosmetics, is standardizing on Packeteer PacketShaper appliances to monitor and manage traffic in a hybrid network supporting both private and public Internet applications.
Mary Kay operates a global business with more than 1.6 Million Independent Beauty Consultants. The company's mission-critical supply chain system, which operates on a private network, gives planning staff near real-time access to materials forecasting activities, production scheduling, inventory management and fulfillment processing, to name a few. The company also hosts its own Web presence, including personalized "sites" for the Independent Beauty Consultants, together handling well over 90% of all orders. The sophisticated system lets Mary Kay maintain a competitive edge by satisfying demand while keeping production and inventory costs under control-no small task considering the company offers more than 200 SKUs.
"The PacketShaper systems gave Mary Kay the traffic monitoring and management capabilities needed to accommodate the increased load from a recent advertising campaign," commented Rob Wieters, the company's network architect. "Without the insight and control provided by the PacketShaper and ReportCenter systems, the additional traffic might well have overwhelmed the network and disrupted both the internal supply chain applications and Web-based ordering system."
In terms of Web traffic, the advertising campaign, designed to reacquaint consumers with the brand, was an unqualified success. "Within 10 minutes of running a primetime ad and continuing for up to two hours, Web traffic increased significantly," Wieters noted. "But because we had modeled traffic using the ReportCenter and prioritized all applications accordingly, we were able to handle the extra load without adding any bandwidth or making any other capacity changes."
Based on experience at other companies using PacketShapers for WAN optimization, the IT staff decided to install PacketShaper 10000 appliances in Mary Kay's Dallas, Texas datacenter. The units were deployed in a fiber-failover configuration to shape traffic from two separate ISPs, which was then load-balanced to the Web server farm in a DMZ. Using ReportCenter, the IT staff was able to model traffic over a period of four months to determine bandwidth utilization trends for the corporate and e-commerce applications: The insight enabled the staff to optimize the partitions used to segment major environments, adjust policies on higher priority applications to manage contention, and protect daily corporate traffic while giving Web traffic the ability to utilize all available Internet bandwidth.
With such a successful initial deployment, Mary Kay has begun positioning Packetshapers in other key areas of the company's network. Ultimately, Mary Kay plans that all distribution centers, warehouses and manufacturing facilities in the U.S., along with all international offices, will be managed with Packeteer's PolicyCenter. The traffic shaping policies employed will be similar to the one used during the initial campaign. The company also plans to activate the optional compression module for their installed PacketShapers, potentially cutting overall traffic in half, to maximize utilization of existing leased lines. Once latency becomes an issue with the addition of voice over IP (VoIP) and international locations, Mary Kay expects to utilize the acceleration enhancement in the PacketShaper product line. These infrastructure changes are expected to put Mary Kay in a better position in the future as the business grows.
According to Henry Draughon, business development manager with Florance & Associates, the Packeteer channel partner responsible for the Mary Kay account, "Mary Kay is a company that really showcases the versatile solutions offered by Packeteer. Not only is Mary Kay handling increased network loads with their existing bandwidth, they're well positioned to accommodate future application rollouts that will be optimized by the PacketShaper's comprehensive compression, acceleration and control capabilities." -http://www.packeteer.com
Pictures for this story
