AUSTIN, Texas -- Convenience store and gas station retailers including Belleville, Ill.-based MotoMart; Millersburg, Ohio-based Holmes Oil; Marietta, Ohio-based Par Mar; and Houston-based Star Fuels have recently engaged Acumera to deploy network-wide cellular broadband failover at a combined count of more than 220 retail locations.
Acumera, a leader in trusted connection services for retail organizations, also recently announced the latest addition to its Apps for Your Network suite of services: the Dual WAN Failover App. The new app provides high availability wide area network (WAN) connectivity for convenience stores by automatically switching to a secondary connection whenever occasional interruptions in the primary connection occur.
The Dual WAN Failover App is highly configurable on a site-by-site basis, the company said, enabling customers to customize their failover and fail-back thresholds and choose the IP address or addresses used to test connectivity. Like all Acumera Apps for Your Network services, the Dual WAN Failover App is integrated with the AcuVigil dashboard to provide customizable alerts and reports, including historical network performance.
According to Acumera vice president Tom Yemington, WAN failover has become an important resource for Acumera's customer base because it is a way convenience stores can achieve swift, secure card transactions and ensure that critical operations continue without interruption of service.
"Networks fail for many reasons, from severe weather to telecom breakdowns, but WAN failover capability--particularly to external cellular broadband with a pooled data plan--now gives c-store operators a reliable, cost-effective way to reduce their exposure to business risks and losses associated with network downtime," said Yemington. "Installations using Acumera's Dual WAN Failover App exhibit Enterprise-class uptime at a significantly lower cost than a typical T-1 connection."
"Our business relies on the ability to securely and reliably process credit-card transactions in the stores and at the pumps, especially at our high-traffic stores. If a customer waits any amount of time for a transaction to clear the network, we risk future opportunities to serve them," said Brad Miller, Par Mar's director of IT. "With Acumera, we don't have to worry about losing network connectivity or visibility into important business systems in the event that a primary connection fails."
Acumera manages the entire connectivity solution for convenience stores, including evaluation of hardware and carrier options to determine the configuration needed for a dependable backup connection, installation of required equipment and definition of failover settings and alerts.
The Dual WAN Failover App is one of more than 20 apps now available through Acumera's Apps for Your Network platform, which provides a remotely upgradeable system for securely connecting devices and information to the "Internet of Things."
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