National Storage

The challenge

National Storage is one of the leading self-storage providers in Australia and New Zealand, with over 230 centres and more than 100,000 residential and commercial customers.

Since its founding in 2000, National Storage has consistently acquired new storage facilities that challenge communications implementation owing to their suburban and regional locations. Country towns, new metropolitan suburbs and inner-city locations all have self-storage needs, but do not always have great internet access. While the NBN roll-out has had the best of intentions, there are significant connectivity black-spots, which often intersect with areas cheaper in rent, and otherwise ideal for storage facilities.

In 2018-19, National Storage acquired 35 new facilities and only had a couple of weeks per site to deploy new business systems. That is not enough time for traditional fibre business services to be installed. National Storage required a scalable solution to switch on new sites in the shortest time frame possible, and one that could be repeated at sites across Australia.

The solution

Aussie Broadband designed a VMware SD-WAN solution to ensure National Storage maintained a competitive edge using technology and to help them drive efficiency, speed to market and security around their business.

Aussie Broadband delivered real time visibility of apps and their performance to National Storage through their Network Operations Centre. The solution would also deliver rapid, low touch deployment capability for new sites. Network quality and resilience has improved as VMware SD-WAN can bond multiple lower cost links in fringe areas including copper, NBN, fibre and 4G services. Additional services would no longer be ‘redundant' as a backup. Instead, they would be continually used to increase available bandwidth. Latency-sensitive traffic, such as video, is steered across the fastest link, while browsing can take any available path.

Having a site live in a matter of hours was now possible, and the scope to acquire and add further locations was no longer limited by in-place connectivity.

The result

Aussie Broadband successfully implemented a scalable VMware SD-WAN solution at National Storage to enable further technology-driven innovation and to allow for the rapid deployment of new sites. Furthermore, VMware SD-WAN will boost network performance in areas where connectivity options are limited.

National Storage benefits from Aussie Broadband's Enterprise nbn™, Aussie Fibre Internet and more than 30 other connectivity options. This ensures the best connection and redundancy solution is available at each site. Furthermore, the VMware SD-WAN Edges bolsters the performance of the network, even when location tests the limits of aging and unreliable copper infrastructure.

Some examples of the functionality enhancements that National Storage have achieved across their business with the Aussie Broadband network include:

• Video broadcast updates of company news
• Multimedia training for a more engaging experience
• Video conferencing so remote workers feel more involved
• Reliable, fast and secure access to cloud-based core business applications

Using VMware's dynamic multi path optimisation, each brand edge device optimises and enhances traffic flow to make the most of the available connections, maximising performance.

National Storage does not need to send technical staff out, instead the VMware unit is despatched from head office pre-configured for branch staff to simply unpack and connect to power.