Improving Revenue Protection by Replacing Microsoft DHCP With SOLIDserver

Project Objectives

Key Benefits

Super-Pharm is the largest chain of pharmacy stores in Israel that is operated by franchises. Since opening its first store in 1978, the company has grown to include 280 stores located throughout the country, with 78 branches in Poland, and a Super-Pharm online website.

Downtime of our operations has been significantly reduced, and now stands very close to zero, thus helping avoid loss of revenue.
Nir Ben-Zion, IT and Cloud Director

Situation and Challenges Being Faced

As part of the IT management of their 300 retail stores, SuperPharm was using a centralized DHCP from Microsoft, in active/active mode. The organization was constantly acquiring other companies, resulting in an ever-increasing number of devices connecting to their network. However, the limitations of Microsoft DHCP, particularly around capacity, was making it challenging to manage this large, growing volume of stores and devices.

Lack of visibility on devices cross-platform (NAC etc..) was one important problem area. When failure occurred, devices were no longer connected, but staff only learnt about the issues when calls were received by the IT support department.

Solution Implemented

After researching for DHCP solutions, Super-Pharm narrowed their choice down to EfficientIP and two other DDI (DNSDHCP-IPAM) vendors. EfficientIP provided the fastest response, proposing the most efficient solution. The implication and dedication of the Account Manager and even top management was also key in the decision-making process. It gave Super-Pharm good confidence in EfficientIP being a trusted, caring vendor to work with, so EfficientIP’s SOLIDserver DHCP was selected over the competition.

The replacement of Microsoft DHCP with the EfficientIP offering ran very smoothly. Nir Ben-Zion, IT and Cloud Director at Super-Pharm, highlighted that “The SOLIDserver DHCP solution proved to be extremely easy to implement, being rapidly installed on local servers in all 300 stores.” The project started with 20 stores being initially deployed with SOLIDserver DHCP, and the rest following shortly afterwards. The whole deployment was completed in less than three months, which was even quicker than what had been planned.

Main Results

Super-Pharm were very impressed with the outcome of the implementation, stating it to be one of their IT department’s most successful projects. From the very start, everything worked exactly as they had expected, and immediate business benefits were seen. Super-Pharm was most pleased by the resulting High Availability, especially in local/offline mode.

Nir Ben-Zion stated that “Downtime of our operations has been significantly reduced, and now stands very close to zero, thus helping avoid loss of revenue.” The decentralization of DHCP has led to improved DHCP redundancy, overcoming the previous limitations concerning failovers whereby local servers sometimes needed to be switched or replaced. With EfficientIP’s DDI appliances DHCP services are consolidated, thus ensuring continuity based on an active-active DHCP failover architecture and highly-available hardware platforms. This has allowed Super-Pharm to eliminate dependency on one single DHCP for the entirety of their stores.

Conclusions / Future Plans

As a next step, Super-Pharm is starting to look seriously at Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. Apps & services will be moving to the cloud, helping to remove local dependency.

And in the near future, further EfficientIP solutions will most likely be deployed. Among those currently being investigated are the SOLIDserver DNS solution, which could replace or supplement the Microsoft DNS being used today. On the security side, SOLIDserver DDI’s integration with Cisco Umbrella is an option being considered, making use of DNS Firewall and blocklists (deny lists) to strengthen external security.