SAN DIEGO – April 3, 2018 – Mushroom Networks, innovators in Broadband-Bonding™ and Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) platforms, today announced Ascend Clinical, a healthcare services and the leading software provider for the renal community across the entire United States as well as Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, has selected and deployed Mushroom Networks’ Truffle Broadband-Bonding SD-WAN platform to upgrade their legacy MPLS network with a Software-Defined Network (SDN) architecture. By doing so, Ascend Clinical boosted performance and reliability for mission-critical applications while simultaneously lowering costs and complexity for its IT staff.

“We have various of our locations came up into our MPLS network over time with varying performance, SLAs and service contracts. When realized that we were not getting our expectations met by MPLS, we started looking for an alternative solution”, said Ken Peterlin, the IT Manager at Ascend Clinical, who was the business sponsor and the technical lead for the WAN upgrade project. “We were looking at a solution that can take advantage of cost effective bandwidth at our locations and add redundancy to our network. We wanted to take advantage of whatever cost effective bandwidth was available in our locations and that meant sometimes fiber, sometimes cable and sometimes copper. The beauty of Mushroom boxes is that, it can utilize whatever is available in that location”, added Peterlin.

Mushroom’s SD-WAN platform is capable of Broadband Bonding, the technology that enables packets from the same flow to traverse diverse WAN links as needed and therefore creating a self-healing network set on autopilot. “With Mushroom Networks’ Truffle appliances, we were not only able to bring cost effective bandwidth and reliability to our offices, but also add another layer of security as the traffic is split into smaller pieces and travel through different paths, creating a setup where no single path has the complete data flow – that was certainly part of the appeal for us. We also moved away from the single point of failure of a traditional MPLS network”.

Unlike other SD-WAN solutions, Truffle employs Mushroom’s patented Broadband-Bonding technology that enables high-performance, high-bandwidth connectivity as well as sustained application-level performance. Broadband Bonding also enables Ascend Clinical WAN network to leverage secondary and tertiary circuits in order to deliver all available bandwidth from all circuits simultaneously, with an always-on, auto-failover design that prioritizes and optimizes mission-critical applications automatically. Using Truffle, Mushroom Networks provided Ascend Clinical with a completely new SDN architecture to its distributed offices that are servicing over 30,000 patients across the entire United States as well as Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.