Albertina Kerr is a non-profit organization which helps Oregonians who face mental health challenges and developmental disabilities. Albertina Kerr was recently named Oregon’s 2nd most admired non-profit in a survey of more than 1,800 CEOs and business leaders by the Portland Business Journal.

Enabling reliability and built-in redundancy for more than 60 office locations and boosting Internet speeds for cloud-based applications, reducing emergency calls to on-call technicians.

“Since Albertina Kerr is 24/7 healthcare organization, maintaining reliable connections to cloud-based services is of the utmost importance. The main objective was to deploy devices at our 60+ locations to maintain not only redundant connections, but also provide faster Internet speeds”, says Ryan Headrick, Information Technology Manager at Albertina Kerr, who leads the project for the organizations more than 60 locations.

Ryan adds, “…we looked at 3 other hardware products that claimed to provide similar services to what Mushroom Networks offers. Most either didn’t live up to the standards we expected or required specific engineers to setup and maintain the products. On the other hand, Mushroom Networks products allow our IT department to manage the maintenance and configuration in-house”.

With the proliferation of public, private or hybrid cloud-based services, organizations with multiple locations depend heavily on the WAN (Wide Area Network) connectivity performance and uptime. The capability of shielding outages, performance fluctuations and other unavoidable network conditions from applications and services is a fundamental requirement for day-to-day business operations.

Truffle, Mushroom Networks’ Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) device, was a perfect fit for Kerr as the technology provided best in class Broadband Bonding and traffic management with a high ROI (Return on Investment).

Albertina Kerr used to use routers for point-to-point VPN connectivity between their branch offices. Since Mushroom Networks Broadband Bonding device, Truffle, provided Broadband Bonding, Truffle became the main VPN/Firewall device at more than 60 remote branch locations spread through Western Oregon. Even though Kerr decided to replace their VPNs with Truffle, Truffle can provide bonding of third-party VPNs in a transparent manner if preferred.

The boost in uptime of branch office connectivity meant the general availability of the private and public cloud-based services to Kerr employees increased and outages were nearly eliminated. “Since implementing the [Truffle] devices, our emergency on-call technicians receive much fewer downtime calls. This has been beneficial to not only our employees, but also to our fiscal budget”, says Ryan Headrick.

Truffle Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) appliances are available both in hardware form factor, as well as in virtualized form, namely Truffle V. Once locations install the devices between their existing WAN line and existing LAN network, additional WAN lines can be added to the Truffle appliances to enable Broadband Bonding. Through a simple GUI, overlay tunnels between branch offices can be created to support mesh, star or hybrid topologies for the VPNs between branches.

Since Truffle devices are powered by the industry leading SD-WAN architecture, creating specialized tunnels with various features and capabilities enable IT Managers to manage and control their WAN networks with ease.

As an example, VoIP Armor, a specialized bonding tunnel that is optimized for VoIP/SIP traffic, enables hosted or in-house VoIP solutions to have significantly improved reliability and boosted voice quality.

Truffle devices offer a very attractive ROI (Return on Investment) where a rock-solid WAN architecture can be built using cost-effective broadband lines.

Truffle, a SD-WAN device that bonds 2 or more broadband lines will provide the following benefits:

Boost in WAN Performance:

Since Truffle appliances have the ability to bond 2 or more WAN lines for optimum performance, the overall WAN metrics will improve. As an example, a VPN connecting a branch office to the HQ office will have the full bonded speed as opposed to an individual line speed.

Boost in WAN Reliability:

Truffle provides self-healing WAN and dynamic failover capabilities. As an example, an ongoing Internet session will be shielded from any WAN outages, or WAN performance fluctuations, as long as one of the WAN connections is still up.

Reduced WAN Cost:

If available, a single WAN link with comparable SLAs and performance metrics will be costly compared to building the comparable WAN via Broadband Bonding appliances.

Reduced Emergency Calls & Related Costs:

Implementing Truffle will significantly reduce emergency calls for IT problem tickets as most WAN-related outages and emergencies will be shielded from the users and therefore can be addressed in scheduled maintenance windows.

Specialized SDN tunnels:

Truffle offers SD-WAN with Broadband Bonding. This means that specialized tunnels customized for the specific application at hand will fit your networking needs like a glove. As an example, VoIP Armor is a tunnel that optimizes VOIP/SIP traffic in the network to shield the phone conversations against any network performance fluctuations and network outages.

Albertina Kerr is a non-profit organization which helps Oregonians who face mental health challenges and developmental disabilities. Albertina Kerr tried various options, before deciding on Truffle by Mushroom Networks, to solve their branch office WAN connectivity performance and reliability problems. Once Truffle was installed, their branch office WAN connectivity became extremely reliable and the number of emergency IT tickets dropped significantly. They achieved all these performance and reliability improvements and also were able to save ISP expenses simultaneously.