An Appia Case Study

Introduction

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.