The background
South West Communications Group provides Mole Valley Farmers with a resilient, scalable wide area network (WAN) that connects the 40+ sites elements of its geographically-spread business.
Mole Valley Farmers was started in 1960 by a small group of farmers living around the South Molton area. It ran as a co-operative operating on a minimum profit margin to encourage continuity and growth in the farming community. It operates out of multiple mills and stores in the South West supplying a vast range of farming, gardening, home, tool and pet care goods to farmers and the public alike.
The challenge
Mole Valley Farmers has several parts to its business: its own brand of retail outlet branches and mills, a specialist feed supplement mineral plant, a quality farm building engineering division and a number of SCATS Country stores. It has since extended this further following the acquisition of farming merchants DI Bridgman & Sons Ltd.
The traditional Mole Valley Farmers’ shops and mills were communicating with head office via a BT MPLS network, while the SCATS stores operated through an MPLS network from NTL.
Mole Valley Farmers wanted to unify its communications network through a single supplier. As a previous network breakdown had resulted in economic chaos adversely effecting sales figures and stock control, it was essential to Mole Valley that full resilience be built into the new network to prevent any loss of service to any part of its organisation in the future.
The solution
South West Communications Group provided Mole Valley Farmers with a cohesive, highly secure and resilient WAN which incorporated several different technologies. The wide area network terminates within South West Communications Group’s Exeter-based data centre to provide the highest level of security and availability. Interconnectivity across the key sites was achieved using the following technologies:
- Highly resilient and scalable network infrastructure
- Secure MPLS (multi protocol label switching) cloud connectivity
- Leased lines with failover to broadband
- VPN broadband connectivity with ISDN backup
- Tier 1 grade security, stability and availability
- Platinum support 24/7
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