Digital transformation to improve operational efficiency is a top priority among enterprises and a key differentiator in helping companies develop innovative products and services.[i] For one global electronics manufacturer, KEMET Electronics Corporate, digital transformation meant rearchitecting its backbone network and deploying a secure software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) to quickly move its on-premises business-critical applications to a more scalable and resilient Oracle® Cloud infrastructure.
KEMET Increases Performance by Moving Critical Apps and DR to the Cloud
KEMET Electronics Corporation, a leading global electronics manufacturer, moved its critical business applications and disaster recovery (DR) to Oracle Cloud with Equinix and Open Systems through Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and multicloud interconnection. Find out why in this case study.
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Consolidating business operations apps in the cloud
KEMET, a U.S.-based manufacturer of capacitor technologies with more than 180,000 customers and a global distribution network, sought to consolidate multiple on-premises business operations applications, including those from a recent acquisition, and migrate some of its more business-critical software solutions to the Oracle® Cloud. Specifically, KEMET wanted to move its easy-to-buy (ETBF) enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business applications to Oracle Cloud for greater scalability and redundancy. In order to digitally transform its business operations, KEMET needed to optimize and secure its network backbone for exchanging sensitive data and workloads between its on-premises systems and Oracle Cloud.
KEMET partnered with Open Systems, an Equinix reseller, to deploy a high-performance, scalable and secure SD-WAN backbone and enable fast private access to Oracle Cloud on Platform Equinix®. Open Systems is a secure access service edge (SASE) pioneer that delivers a complete, end-to-end SD-WAN and security solution. Open Systems’ managed services offer a cloud-native SD-WAN architecture, secure intelligent edge, hybrid cloud support, 24×7 operations and predictive analytics. From the Open Systems SD-WAN backbone, KEMET could connect its on-premises infrastructure to Oracle Cloud via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) FastConnect and Equinix Cloud Exchange FabricTM (ECX FabricTM). This gave the company the fast, direct and secure access to Oracle Cloud it required without going over the public internet. KEMET was also able to deploy redundancy for its data and applications within Oracle Cloud. By replicating data and applications via a high-performance, secure hybrid multicloud infrastructure, KEMET achieved greater application manageability through simplified operations and proximate network access to Oracle Cloud.
Scalable internet access and peering
Open Systems deployed identical KEMET SD-WAN and hybrid multicloud infrastructures in Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX™) data centers in Los Angeles (with OCI FastConnect to Cloud U.S. West) and Ashburn (with OCI FastConnect to Oracle Cloud U.S. East), which provided the operational expertise, standards compliance and physical security to safeguard KEMET’s valuable digital assets. The two KEMET infrastructures were directly and securely interconnected to the public internet over the Open Systems Secure SD-WAN backbone using Equinix ConnectTM, which aggregates upstream bandwidth from major internet service providers (ISP), making it available for downstream customers as a single source solution (see diagram below). Equinix Connect enabled KEMET to provision connections to ISPs in days rather than weeks.
Equinix Connect also leverages local exchanges, in this case the Equinix Internet ExchangeTM, to scale the internet connectivity and reduce network latency. Equinix Internet Exchange enables network aggregation between KEMET’s ISPs via IP peering using a single physical port, delivering greater scalability when moving traffic between the two KEMET infrastructures on Platform Equinix. The Equinix Internet Exchange service securely exchanges routing information between multiple peers through a redundant pair of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions, enabling greater resiliency (see diagram below of the KEMET Ashburn deployment).
Driving greater business operation efficiency
By deploying the Open Systems Secure SD-WAN and Equinix interconnection solutions, KEMET consolidated and streamlined its critical business operations, while enhancing its network performance and end-to-end security and resiliency. The SD-WAN, ISP aggregation and network security unification enabled by Open Systems and Equinix dramatically lowered KEMET’s latency to single digits (< 10 milliseconds) when connecting to Oracle Cloud. It also significantly increased KEMET’s bandwidth while protecting users, data and applications on-premises and in the cloud with consistent policy-based, app-aware security controls. Using ECX Fabric, KEMET can now provision high-speed, low-latency connections to clouds in a few hours versus weeks, accelerating its migration of critical data/apps to Oracle Cloud and scaling its IT infrastructure on demand using best-in-class cloud providers. KEMET also gained a reliable and cost-efficient cloud-based disaster recovery environment that can quickly replicate critical data/apps to Oracle Cloud via ECX Fabric virtual connections.
For manufacturers, such as KEMET, accelerating digital transformation can make a huge difference in speeding innovative products to market and gaining the competitive advantage that will have a positive impact on their bottom line.
Learn more by reading the KEMET/Open Systems Case Study: KEMET Accelerates Cloud Migration and Resiliency.
[i] Enterprise Strategy Group. “Key Trends Influencing How Businesses Build for the Cloud,” May 2020.
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