Growth has always been part of the company's objectives—during its first four years in operation it expanded by 800 per cent. Still family owned today, Nature's Path Foods has enjoyed an annual growth rate of 25-30 per cent a year.

The company has four facilities: two manufacturing plants, a distribution warehouse, and head office totaling 400,000 square feet and employing more than 250 employees. The operations are located in Richmond and Delta, British Columbia, and Blaine, Washington. Currently the two production facilities produce approximately 72 tons of organic cereal each day. In order to keep up with the company's sales growth, the Blaine plant is currently undergoing its second expansion since opening in 1999.

Nature's Path is constantly searching to strike a balance between business growth and sustainability. In fact, the official company vision is to 'Be a trusted name for organic foods in every home; socially responsible, environmentally sustainable and profitable.'

"Within our growth objectives, it's very important to understand that at the same time we are trying to promote sustainability and how to be low-impact as a business," says Nature's Path technology manager, Ron Boucher. "To us, a part of corporate social responsibility is having reliable computer systems that are energy efficient both in terms of use of hydro, and with regard to having a system that can be built upon to accommodate our growth so we are not needlessly discarding hardware into the waste stream."

In 2003, as part of Nature's Path mandate to grow and be profitable, the company moved its headquarters from Delta B.C. to a larger site in Richmond B.C. This presented the perfect opportunity for the company to deploy a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) system—a method of using the Ethernet data network for telephone calls. Adding or moving a telephone within the system is as simple as plugging into an available Ethernet jack on the wall. Remote locations and employees working from home can also connect through the data network for telephone calls.

"We decided to move to VoIP because we were adding people to our company, our business demands were growing and we needed a solution that was entirely flexible," explains Boucher. "Voice over IP simplified things for us enormously. It gave us the ability to put phones in our remote locations, which is key to having a successful business operation in our field."

The ability to deploy a solution at an affordable price with enterprise-class functionality and performance is critical for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). Boucher says HP solutions are geared toward helping medium-sized companies like Nature's Path remain agile and efficient, while at the same time benefiting from the same type of IT flexibility that enterprises enjoy.

After researching a number of different solutions and vendors, Nature's Path selected a VoIP system from Mitel Networks based on solutions from ProCurve Networking by HP. Boucher and his team based this decision on the fact that an IP telephony solution from ProCurve and Mitel Networks offered a good return on investment, while delivering high performance and no-compromise functionality at an affordable price.

Nature's Path was no stranger to ProCurve Networking and HP equipment—the company was already using ProCurve switches, and HP servers and PCs.

"This was another key consideration. It seemed natural to continue the relationship. Through experience we already knew that ProCurve would give us the quality of service we needed," explains Boucher.

To ease deployment of IP telephony, Nature's Path installed a ProCurve Switch 5308xl with Power over Ethernet, based on ProCurve Adaptive EDGE™ Architecture, which recognizes the importance of the network's "edge" in maintaining the connections necessary for networking applications.

With layer 3 controls, in which information “packets” sent over the local area network (LAN) are processed seamlessly, and with speed and agility, ProCurve products provide the right combination of performance, flexibility and reliability, both in the office and for remote sites, says Boucher.

They also provide direct current (DC) power through Ethernet cables directly to VoIP telephone handsets, enabling reliable operation of each telephone. In addition, ProCurve switches provide for a redundant power supply (RPS), and the entire LAN infrastructure is also protected by an Uninterruptible Power Supply so that failure of a single device will not interrupt overall telephone operations, even with a power outage for the facility.

Boucher adds that he has been impressed by the reliability of the ProCurve Switch 5308xl.

"The ProCurve Switch has been rock-solid," he said. "Once installed, it was up for 300 days before we took it down for maintenance. It was a big plus. That's almost 100 per cent uptime."

To ensure the newly-converged IP network would support both voice and data applications, Nature's Path used a VLAN (virtual local area network) topology to protect voice quality in the presence of uneven data traffic, and also to ensure that business-critical applications could continue to function without interruption.

VLAN topologies fully isolate voice and data networks and guard against several network impairments that can otherwise affect voice quality, including packet loss, jitter and one-way delay, or latency. To ensure quality, voice traffic needs to be prioritized higher than data traffic on every link along the data path between IP telephones. Telephone calls go through the network without delays, even if there are heavy amounts of "data." QoS tags on the voice traffic are automatically inserted into the traffic streams by the Mitel telephone equipment.

ProCurve switches offer a weighted fair queuing (WFQ) mechanism to minimize delay for real-time applications and guaranteed availability of bandwidth to protect against packet loss. This approach allows several traffic types to share the same link and ensure that higher-priority traffic types (VoIP) get the bandwidth they need when they need it without starving other business critical applications.

The use of VLANs also ensures that excessive broadcast and multicast packets present on many data networks will not disrupt IP telephony equipment or impact voice quality. Along with 802.1p/q priority tagging, VLANs offer a significant security benefit by providing a convenient way of isolating IP telephony equipment from data traffic.

A scalable, integrated voice and data system leveraging a single network and combining ProCurve Adaptive EDGE™ Architecture and Mitel Networks 3300 Integrated Communications Platform of IP phones and applications, has brought many benefits to Nature's Path.

Above all, Nature's Path needed a reliable solution that would grow with the business and fit with the company's values. As technology manager, Ron Boucher gauges the solution's effectiveness by its reliability, and he hails the ProCurve technology as some of the most reliable he's seen.

For employees, the transition to VoIP was practically seamless, says Boucher.

"Staff went home on a Friday night, and when they came in on Monday morning, the phones worked," he says. "Our president, to this day, is still amazed by the speed and ease of the solution."

He adds that for him, one of the biggest practical bonuses of the new system is prevalent whenever employees need to move to a new desk. He no longer has to devote time to physically moving telephone lines.

"Staff still come and say to me: 'we need to move.' I say: 'That's fine, move anywhere you want, your phone will always work.'"

The ProCurve Networking business unit of HP is a supplier of enterprise networking solutions comprising wired and wireless networking products, services and solutions—including WAN routers, Ethernet switches, routing switches, wireless access points and network management applications—which allow customers to build networks based on open standards that meet current and future needs for security, performance and reliability.

The ProCurve Networking Adaptive EDGE Architecture is a unique design strategy that creates a secure, mobile, multi-service network by placing intelligence at the edge-where users connect and policies are enforced. This innovative approach creates a dynamic network infrastructure designed to keep up with advancing technology and user needs while protecting business investments.

When you are ready to explore the benefits a ProCurve Networking solution can offer you, call HP at 1-800-975-7682.

To learn more about ProCurve Networking's Adaptive EDGE Architecture™ solutions, visit our home page.

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