Kölle Zoo equipped for future digitalization requirements

About Kölle Zoo

With 16 experience stores in Germany and 5 experience stores in Austria, Kölle Zoo Holding GmbH is one of the leading specialist animal supplies stores. Since 1969, the name Kölle Zoo has been synonymous with expertise in the field of animals. On an average of 2,500 m² of retail space, the experience stores offer a diverse and high-quality product range as well as extensive services for animals and pet owners.

The individual branches accessed the company resources necessary for the operation of the experience stores via a terminal server architecture. However, the maximum bandwidth of the MPLS lines used was enormously limited, so that sometimes one or the other branch was offline and no debit card payment was possible during the process. In addition, there have been some discussions for some time to increase the stability and performance of the company network for future digital services such as customer Wi-Fi or VoIP.

VeloCloud SD-WAN

The solution to the problem emerged in a conversation with an employee of A1 Digital International GmbH, who discussed a VeloCloud SD-WAN solution that made it possible to bridge the line deficit with LTE in the shortest possible time without making significant changes to the network.

A Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) decouples network traffic management from hardware and uses software and cloud-based technologies to facilitate the deployment of WAN services to branches. The basis is a hybrid multi-hubsite concept, which enables Kölle Zoo to use the A1 Digital VeloCloud and an internal and external data centre. To create further redundancies, services and applications were migrated to the cloud and selected servers were outsourced to an external data centre. A high-availability network is designed to protect against hardware failures, and a multi-network LTE connection with a low-cost Data Plan from A1 Digital acts as a backup line. In order to identify problems more quickly, the Quality of Service enables accurate evaluations of which applications cause which traffic and where bottlenecks are created.

Regardless of the internet provider, Kölle Zoo can now use the bandwidth more efficiently thanks to the flexible bundling and parallel use of the VDSL, LTE and MPLS lines available at the sites and at the same time benefit from a much higher stability and performance than before. SD-WAN is not only a cost-effective network solution, but also a smart and future-proof basis for future digitisation requirements of Kölle Zoo.