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Sumul Dairy goes Wi-Fi with D-Link wireless

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CIOL Bureau
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SURAT: As an enterprise grows in its business volumes as well as in its physical size over a wide area, it becomes more and more critical and difficult to monitor its operations. Availability of real time data and communication facilities over secure networks become all the more important. Sumul Dairy in Gujarat, a 425 Crore organization, which is a part of the Surat District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union Limited, is one such enterprise.

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Its campus is spread over an area of over 2 square kilometers, having departments like veterinary department, by-products department, finished products sections, artificial insemination department, and the ERP infrastructure. The boardroom where all-important decisions of turning the company's vision into a reality take shape, is also a part of the same campus.

Explaining the challenges the company faced earlier, Satyen Naik, Assistant Manager (IS) of Sumul Dairy, says that, “There was no connectivity between the head office and the different chilling centres such as Bajipura, Chalthan, Navi Pardi, where the milk gets collected from the villages. Business data was not available in time at the central office and it took a couple of days to get the data leading to business losses. Leased lines are not reliable at remote locations, and our telephone bills were very high.”

" After evaluating the benefits of Wireless Networking and several options, we deployed 12 D-Link Access Points (APs) on our large campus to provide Wi-Fi connectivity and share mission-critical data within various departments. With this, we have benefited a lot in terms of cost reduction, monitoring and maintenance issues,” says Naik

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“With your critical data being carried over wireless signals, the network security becomes an all important issue. Security management is an important issue. We use 128-bit encryption, anti-Denial of Service infrastructure, NAT firewalls, Mac address-based access control, and password authentication to make our network secure," he revealed..

Sumul uses the Wireless links to connect to their milk collection locations spread over large distances making use of D-Link DWL-1750 Outdoor Access Points and 23dBi Parabolic Grid antennae.

The Wireless link is used to transmit Oracle data, signals from IP based D-Link surveillance cameras DCS-1000, and e-mail communication. The company has also procured a license to allow voice communication over the network using Voice over WLAN. The Voice network uses D-Link DG-104SH VOIP gateways.

“With the wireless links in place, the cost for all business data communication, information transfer, and video conferencing between the head office and remote offices is reduced only to the cost of running the wireless equipment. This is very nominal compared to the cost of using the traditional infrastructure available otherwise,” beams Naik.

“The VoWLAN solution that we selected is very cost-effective and reliable. In the near future, we plan to implement Video Conferencing facilities on the same network," he adds.

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