Background

A major beer brand operates 26 production plants and multiple regional offices across China. Its network equipment primarily consists of Cisco 2960s/2960X access switches and 4500 series core switches, with an average service life of over 8 years. The plants are connected to data centers via Cisco SD-WAN. In recent years, frequent power outages and aging hardware have led to a 37% year-over-year increase in switch failure rates, exposing three major issues in the traditional O&M model:

  • Declining Reliability of Aging Equipment: Frequent power failures increase the risk of hardware damage.
  • High IP Management Complexity: Over 200 IP subnets make precise issue tracing difficult.
  • Technological Gaps: Legacy devices do not support modern platforms like Cisco DNAC, preventing automated policy deployment.

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Solution Summary

Through an "End-to-End Lifecycle Maintenance Plan for Legacy Equipment", we achieve the following without hardware replacement:

  • Intranet Standardization Framework: Develop a unified “Factory Network Configuration Guide” to standardize switch configurations across all sites.
  • System Image Backup: Regularly back up switch firmware images.
  • Configuration Backup: Use SolarWinds to back up switch configurations.

Key Advantages

Stability Assurance for Aging Devices:
  • Establishes a firmware backup mechanism for switches. Enables quick recovery after power failures by restoring corrupted flash memory—greatly reducing downtime.
Intranet Standardization:
  • With baseline configuration templates, compliance across switches at 26 plants exceeds 95%.
Precise Maintenance in Complex Environments:
  • SolarWinds platform enables real-time monitoring of device status and configuration for more proactive management.

Customer Pain Points & Challenges

  • Difficult Maintenance of Aging Devices: Due to energy-saving policies, frequent power outages in factories lead to recurring switch failures. Hardware repair and replacement are slow. Some switch models are no longer officially supported, and the customer has a limited hardware upgrade budget.
  • Heavy Intranet Management Workload: Compatibility issues between ISE authentication systems and older devices lead to frequent authentication failures.
  • Pressure on Business Continuity: Factory KPIs impose strict accountability for outages; network interruptions exceeding 10 minutes trigger production loss accountability.

Customer Benefits

  • Hard Cost Savings: Backup solutions accelerate recovery after device failure, reducing both hardware and software replacement costs. Standardized O&M minimizes configuration errors and shortens ticket resolution time.
  • Business Continuity Assurance: Power outage-related network failures dropped by 60% year-over-year, reducing production line losses caused by device failure.
  • Enhanced Management Efficiency: Enables unified baseline configuration management across multiple factories.