How sweet it is - chocolate manufacturer Elite builds nationwide ATM network - Company Operations

Communications News, June, 1999

ATM network guarantees sweet productivity gains and lower communications costs for chocolate manufacturer.

When Elite, an international chocolate manufacturer based in Israel, migrated its SMDS (switched multimegabit data service) network to ATM (asynchronous transfer mode), company network managers jokingly referred to its planned CBR voice (constant bit rate) service as Chocolate Bit Rate. The ensuing productivity gains and cost savings are proving to be just as sweet as Elite's products, since its new network ensures that the supply of chocolate meets consumer demand at more than 13,000 points of sale. These include supermarkets, kiosks, hotels and restaurants, and a chain of 50 retail stores across the country. Elite's chocolate, coffee, baked goods, and snack foods command over 50% of the market share in all product categories.

With distribution centers and factories scattered nationwide, Elite needed a way to monitor the quantities being produced and shipped. "We required a high throughput network to allow access from all branches to our central database," says Eitan Peled, Elite's information systems manager. "With the vast amounts of data being transferred between hundreds of users, our old 2 Mbps SMDS network just wasn't performing."

Bezeq, Israel's national carrier, suggested Elite migrate to the public ATM network. With data rates up to 155 Mbps and availability at all Elite factory locations, the ATM network provided the ideal solution.

ATM DEMARC DEVICE LIGHTS THE WAY

Rather than swapping out its existing Bay Networks routers, which could not support an ATM uplink, Elite was convinced by Bynet, its local system integrator, that deploying ATM demarcation devices was a better way to go. Bynet recommended the ACE line of ATM-access products from RAD, which offers complete end-to-end service and sophisticated network-management tools, such as monitoring, policing, and shaping. Using a demarc device with such powerful management tools would give Elite the opportunity not only to gauge network performance, ascertaining whether the carrier was meeting its service-level agreements (SLAs), but also to shape traffic to make the best use of available network resources. At four of its factories, Elite connected its existing Bay routers to the Ethernet port of RAD's ACE-20 access concentrators which interface to the public ATM network over E1 UNI (user network interface). RAD's ACE-101 interworking termination units at company headquarters and at the high-traffic distribution center run at 10 Mbps over an STM-1 (155 Mbps) pipeline. The result: "Anetwork that never goes down," says Peled, "and I mean never."

The new ATM network supports Elite's large volume of up-to-the-minute reports on inventory, factory supplies, billing, and accounting generated by a state-of-the-art IP-based real-time stocking application. "It is essential to our business that everyone receive the most up-to-date information," says Peled. In addition, the network provides simple, controlled, and efficient merchandise tracking within the company and outputs barcodes for more efficient distribution outside the factories.

FAST RETURN ON INVESTMENT

A factor that influenced Elite's decision to purchase the ACE line of products is its built-in migration path to an integrated voice and data network. Elite plans to connect its PBXs to the voice ports of the ACE-20 and ACE-101 units, in addition to the LAN traffic, as soon as Bezeq, the local carrier, offers CBR service [the carrier currently offers only best-effort UBR (unspecified bit rate) service], eliminating its large monthly bills for internal telephone calls. Calculating operating costs between sites and the equipment expenditure, Elite estimates it will recoup its investment in less than half a year after running PCM (pulse code modulation) voice over the ATM network. "The network has ample bandwidth to spare without requiring voice compression," adds Peled.

TRAFFIC SHAPING FOR BETTER MANAGEMENT OF NETWORK RESOURCES

Given the nature of best-effort service, traffic shaping is imperative to ensure that bursty LAN (local area network) traffic does not exceed the peak cell rate of 10 Mbps that is part of the SLA between Bezeq and Elite. Bursting over 10 Mbps could result in cells being discarded at Bezeq's ATM switches. Traffic shaping is also essential for branch offices where the E1 UNI link could be a bottleneck. Elite could avoid this eventuality by employing the shaping feature in RAD's ACE-101 and ACE-20. Simply stated, traffic shaping means storing data bursts in predefined and controlled buffers or queues. The queued cells are released according to network capability, ensuring that all data gets through with no lost cells. Shaping also ensures that time-sensitive applications, such as voice, enter the public network jitter-free [with low CDV (cell delay variation)]. The traffic-shaping mechanism transmits the high-priority Quality of Service (QoS) cells equally spaced in the network, called "shaping to CBR." Traffic shaping is an excellent tool with E1 UNI service, as it better utilizes the relatively low bandwidth. ACE-101 and ACE-20 also collect valuable statistics from the physical, ATM, and application layers, enabling accurate measurement of WAN activity.