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When Every Branch Matters: How a Credit Union Reinforced Network Resilience

by | Jul 25, 2025 | Case Studies, Consolidation, Failover Connectivity, Improve Network Security, Network Automation, Out of Band Management, Pillar 2 - Critical Remote, Remote Network Management, Streamline Deployments

When Every Branch Matters: How a Credit Union Reinforced Network Resilience

For many credit unions, digital transformation has expanded well beyond core banking systems. They depend on resilient IT infrastructure for everything from interactive teller machines, to cloud-hosted apps and remote employee access. But for their IT teams, this brings a growing list of challenges: more branches, more network equipment, and more pressure to minimize downtime. And often, they need to solve these challenges without adding staff.

That’s where the cracks begin to show.

One mid-sized U.S. credit union faced a similar dilemma. They had to support more than 200 branch locations, but with only two IT staff. Routine network issues meant spending hours in the car, sometimes just to power cycle a device. Troubleshooting tasks or regular firmware updates easily consumed entire workdays. Combating outages was even worse because they lacked a reliable management path outside of the primary network. Long outages meant long workdays and lots of stress, not to mention the customer-facing issues like lost trust and reputation damage.

But instead of patching the problem, they made a bold move.

They adopted Nodegrid and ZPE Cloud, the out-of-band management solution that enables complete visibility and control, even when the main network fails. For the credit union’s IT team, this enabled them to perform all their jobs – from provisioning to troubleshooting, to device reboots – via remote session. The results? Drastically reduced travel costs, faster incident response times, and peace of mind knowing that every branch was protected by a resilient management backbone.

Download the full case study to see how they transformed their branch operations and set the foundation for secure, scalable growth.

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Living Spaces Furniture: Scaling to 50 sites with only 3 network staff

by | Oct 27, 2023 | Case Studies, Consolidation, Failover Connectivity, Improve Network Security, Increase Productivity, Network Automation, Out of Band Management, Pillar 2 - Critical Remote, Remote Network Management, Simplify Branch Infrastructure, Streamline Deployments

Collapsing the stack and centralizing management helps Living Spaces accelerate scaling across the U.S.

Blake Johnson – Living Spaces Furniture Network Architect

“We’ve quadrupled business, but Nodegrid is actually shrinking our workload, especially as we implement new automation. It’s a gamechanger for network folks. Period.” — Blake Johnson, Network Architect, Living Spaces Furniture

Download the Case Study

Living Spaces is a prominent furniture retailer in the United States. Their store locations include large showrooms, where customers can view furnishings for indoor and outdoor spaces, and plenty of warehouse space for storing on-hand inventory. These locations must serve customers with responsive shopping experiences, which depend on the network infrastructure.

Increasing demand helped Living Spaces grow out of its home state of California, into states including Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and others. Their out-of-band infrastructure was crucial to spinning up new locations and maintaining operations. But they faced a significant problem: this infrastructure was incredibly complex and costly, requiring many dedicated cellular and out-of-band devices at each location. See why their three-person network team needed a solution that could:

  • Reduce costs and eliminate the need for $300,000 per year in SIM contracts
  • Reduce workloads and risks, by centralizing management and minimizing entry points
  • Accelerate deployments by allowing automation

99.999% Uptime for a Top-10 Engineering School

by | Jun 20, 2023 | Actionable Data, Case Studies, Consolidation, Data Center Resilience, Edge Computing, Failover Connectivity, Modernize Legacy Environments, Network Automation, Pillar 1 - Data Center Infrastructure Management, Pillar 2 - Critical Remote, Remote Network Management, Simplify Branch Infrastructure, Virtualization, Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP)

Providing low-level remote access and automation saves hundreds of hours per month for the university’s small IT team

One of the largest universities in the United States fosters academics and research for nearly 40,000 students, staff, and researchers. The university sits among the top 10 schools for engineering, and heavily integrates technology into all disciplines, including engineering, computer sciences, and agricultural studies.

The university received a grant to expand, update, and connect their network of campuses, while enhancing infrastructure and mobility, resiliency, and campus amenities.  But having more than 200 on-campus buildings presents a challenge. The campus is home to academic facilities as well as a hospital, airport, 60,000-seat sports stadium, and dozens of leased spaces for local businesses. This makes the university equivalent to a small city, and its network infrastructure is what keeps it all connected.

Their small IT team was responsible for maintaining more than 10,000 management devices, most of which were long past EOL and frequently failing. They needed a refresh, but with a solution that could also reduce the hundreds of hours they spent every month on travel and on-site work. To maximize their day-to-day efficiency, they required a solution that could overcome these operational gaps:

  • Reducing the 100-150 hours of monthly travel times, by giving engineers the ability to fully access their stack remotely
  • Reducing the 80-120 hours of monthly on-site work required to maintain the 99.999% SLA, by automating manual jobs such as patching and firmware upgrades
  • Expanding their management headroom and use-case adaptability, by migrating to IPv6 and reducing the existing 6RU device stack

Download the full case study to see how ZPE’s Nodegrid hardware and software solved these problems.

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Problems and Gaps

The university is one of the largest in the United States. It sits among the nation’s top 50 schools for research expenditures, and heavily integrates technology into all disciplines, including engineering. Its main campus is home to more than 200 buildings that sit on over 2,500 acres of land. The campus is essentially a small city, and the university’s network infrastructure keeps it all connected.

This network infrastructure, however, was well beyond EOL and in disrepair. But rather than simply upgrade to newer devices, the university’s small IT team wanted to improve the overall quality of life well into the future. This meant addressing three gaps:

  • Inefficient management at scale — Each engineer spent an average of ten hours per month on travel alone, just to traverse the campus’ wide footprint and get to each MDF/IDF closet.
  • Too much focus on ops — The aging infrastructure was on the brink of collapse and required each engineer to spend eight hours per month in on-site work, just to keep devices running.
  • Too many devices — The infrastructure includes roughly 10,000 devices to manage, which was exhausting IP on their limited IPv4 network and too rigid to fit in tight spaces, like their remote farm closets and research labs.

Solution

The university deployed the full lineup of Nodegrid devices, including the Nodegrid Serial Console, Nodegrid Services Routers, and Nodegrid Manager. These allowed them to overcome all three gaps using remote management, automation, and consolidated functionality, to save engineers hundreds of hours every month. Download the full case study to see the complete solution and benefits.

Download the Case Study

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Vapor IO: Re-architecting the Internet

by | Feb 21, 2023 | Case Studies, Consolidation, Pillar 1 - Data Center Infrastructure Management, Pillar 2 - Critical Remote, Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP)

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Automating edge deployments & lights-out management for Vapor® IO

Vapor IO provides autonomous network and data center infrastructure at the network edge. Their goal is to re-architect the traditional Internet into a distributed, ubiquitous, edge-to-edge web that serves end users with SLA-backed routing, up to twelve-nines reliability, 100-microsecond latency, and terabits-per-second bandwidth.

With 36 (and counting) major U.S. markets, and their recent expansion into Barcelona, Spain, Vapor IO needs to run operations as lean as possible. However, as they continued to scale, the complexity of their own management infrastructure stood in the way of achieving this goal.

See why they required eight hours of setup time at each site, and discover which Nodegrid technologies helped significantly streamline not only new installations, but operations and overhead as well. Download the case study for full details.

Problems and Gaps

Vapor IO’s ultimate goal for operations is to deploy lights-out data centers all over the world and minimize the number of staff required to maintain these sites. Crucial to this goal is having the ability to collect billions of data points at each location, which allows teams to monitor and control physical and virtual devices. But their existing management infrastructure was complex and outdated, and consisted of:

  • Cellular modem with third-party
  • Subscription out-of-band router
  • Out-of-band switch
  • Out-of-band serial console
  • Out-of-band laptop/compute node
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One of the company’s core values is to further business goals by making constructive changes and avoiding unnecessary complexity. This management infrastructure only added complexity and would require additional staff to maintain it. To solve this, Vapor IO would have to be proactive in closing several significant gaps:

  • Each edge data center required at least five separate management devices that were not integrated together. Deployments required a skilled technician to be on site for an entire workday. This time sink would multiply in direct correlation to the total number of new sites to deploy.
  • The ability to lease rackspace directly translates to revenue. But each site required Vapor IO to use at least 5RU for its own devices. As demand increased, this dead space would translate to millions in lost revenue, on top of additional power and cooling costs.
  • Having disparate solutions not only increased the total points of failure, but also meant more devices to manage. This increased the likelihood of failures/outages that would require truck rolls, and also increased the ongoing operational workload required to keep many management devices running.
  • A multi-vendor environment meant added overhead and rigidity that complicated procurement, project planning, and development of new designs. This made it difficult to adapt to different use cases and customer requirements.

Solution

Vapor IO deployed the modular Nodegrid Net SR. This appliance provided the capabilities they needed to automate deployments and support lights-out management. The LTE module allows staff to remotely connect to sites and bring resources online, while the SFP module allows each site to connect to their nationwide fiber backbone.

Frank Basso

“Nodegrid keeps our costs down and extends everyone’s capabilities. The automation lets our support teams do specialized jobs, so our engineers can devote more time to delivering customer value.” — Frank Basso, EVP of Operations, Vapor IO

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ZPE Cloud – Silver Peak and Palo Alto Networks Edge Deployment

by | Aug 16, 2022 | Pillar 2 - Critical Remote

Want to know how to set up a Silver Peak appliance and Palo Alto Networks firewall? In our latest video, Director of Solution Engineering Rene Neumann walks you through how to easily create an edge platform using the Nodegrid Gate SR and ZPE Cloud.

This hardware and cloud platform gives you:

SD-WAN capabilities, allowing you to simultaneously connect to Ethernet, fiber, and cellular
Enterprise-class firewall, allowing you to secure all traffic into and out of your edge site

These Silver Peak and Palo Alto templates are available to all customers, and make it easy to deploy and configure virtual machines necessary for edge sites.

Get a hands-on demo

Want to see how easy this is to deploy in your environment? Click the button below to set up a one-on-one demo with Rene himself.

Get a demo

Making Deployment and Management Easy for a Large Retailer

by | Jul 12, 2022 | Case Studies, Pillar 2 - Critical Remote

Simplified retail edge & critical remote access

Making deployment and management easy for a large retailer

A major retail company requires networking that can keep up with demand. However, having large distribution centers and enormous showrooms can push the limits of their connectivity. Internal operations rely heavily on data for logistics and inventory purposes, while customer-facing interactions need strong networking for product availability and order processing transactions. To accommodate rapid business growth, the retailer sought a branch networking solution that they could scale quickly and manage easily.

The Challenge

With traditional edge solutions deployed, the company became accustomed to high support & maintenance costs. However as business began to increase significantly, expansion became critical — but their existing system could not keep up.

The Solution

The company discovered that only Nodegrid could deliver the capabilities they needed for rapid growth. They chose a powerful combination of Nodegrid Services Router (SR) devices: the Net SR (NSR), Gate SR (GSR), and Link SR (LSR).

The Results

The combined Nodegrid solution streamlined the company’s edge networks along with their management efforts.
Instead of requiring a separate switch in the MDF and a dedicated cellular device in each IDF, the retailer needed only the NSR in the MDF. This all-in-one device eliminated the network switch and centralized these critical functions while extending capabilities to each IDF. Connecting the LSR or GSR at the department level also reduced their stack by eliminating the need for purpose-built cellular appliances throughout each store.

Read the Full Case Study