An Appia Case Study

Based in Philadelphia, Unique Industries is a leading manufacturer and distributor of a wide selection of party merchandise and popular licenses.

Unique utilizes Appia’s WANCare network monitoring service to ensure that its network is operating at peak efficiency.

Business Challenge

Unique’s network was experiencing a slowdown that was causing a significant delay in the transmission of data from its various sites. “Our Internet connection was experiencing extreme and intermittent slowness, and our ISP claimed that it was a result of over-utilization of our T1,” said a spokesman at Unique.

The situation was discovered late at night when Appia engineers found that utilization of Unique’s Internet connection exceeded 70 percent. Using Appia’s WANCare network monitoring, the engineers discovered that the excess traffic originated from a server on Unique’s internal network.

“Using its network monitoring system, Appia was able to traverse our network, including switches, routers, and firewalls, to identify a server that was unknowingly acting as an open SMTP relay,” continued Unique’s spokesman.

The Appia Solution

Once identified, the server was isolated from the network. “Appia resolved the issue by preventing the server from accessing the Internet and adjusting our firewall to prevent future occurrences,” continued the spokesman.

WANCare Live Trending confirmed that the problem had been identified and isolated. Unique’s IT staff worked on the server without impacting users.

The Results

Within hours, Unique’s network was back to normal operation. “The problem was difficult to diagnose due to its unpredictable nature – short bursts of high amounts of traffic that slowed down Internet usage – but Appia allowed us to isolate it and correct it.”

For more information about Unique, please see www.favors.com.