Branch-In-a-box

In India largely we are seeing this phenomena, courtesy “India Poised” reforms and the IT revolution happening in the country, even the regional transport authorities, small rural banks, co-operative banks, “kisan mandis” everything is becoming a part of the networked world. As Thomas L. Freedman’s International best seller book’s Title itself says, “ The world is becoming FLAT” and India plays a big role in the flattening process, post our liberalization implemented in early 90’s. Unless it is some non-computerized 3rd world operation, it is connected. Connected to another branch, connected to Head quarters, connected to the world.

Whenever we a looking forward to expand a branch, we need minimum following equipments to connect:

A Small LAN- for the employees of the branch to connect to each other, share data, use common resources like Printer, single internet connection, scanner etc.
A proxy server- to share the internet services.
A WAN connection- to connect to the other branch offices or to the corporate HQ or to the Internet.
A Security appliance – to secure the connects at the corporate and implement the corporate security policies.
A VoIP Box- to share the bandwidth for Voice services for inter-office communications and save the cost for the organization.

So the resultant is that we end up having minimum 5 different equipments for expansion of every branch, each of which becomes a point of failure. The branch will get paralyzed on non-performance of every / any equipment. So we end up having huge inventory and manpower to manage / configure that inventory, which results in wastage of resources, energy, and money on every expansion.

Today, its an age of retail revolution in India, reliance, Bharti-Wal-Mart, Birla, Tata, numerous Insurance companies, numerous banks, even the State Governments are looking at expansion of Administrative branches in form of SWAN, courtesy the NeGP, CIC, and other e- Governance initiatives of the state. Every one, every where is having branches? So how would things work out with so many limitations in the networks?

Many people used to wonder if there could be a way out. How about having everything into one box? How about the box itself could be made redundant? How about remote management of the box, resulting in saving of the technically skilled manpower?

Until they discovered “Branch-in-a-Box” concept. Today we have devices from manufacturers like Allied Telesyn, Cisco, Enterasys, such devices which are a Layer-3 switch, with RPS, with WAN ports, with VoIP ports, with Built-in proxy, with Add-on card for security. Which can be configured to work on load-sharing load balancing between the to boxes, using advanced L3 protocols like VRRP. Just by duplicating one box you can ensure 24x7 un interrupted operations.

Now that’s what we call using the technology.