Case Study: Piston Ring Service achieves near‑100% store uptime and major cost savings with VMware SD-WAN

Uptime is Critical for Store Operations at Automotive Parts Retailer

Piston Ring, a third‑generation, family‑owned automotive parts retailer founded in 1953, struggled with costly and unreliable legacy WANs: dedicated MPLS circuits that sometimes failed for up to six hours, cumbersome VPN backups and manual failovers that disrupted point‑of‑sale operations and customer service. These outages and management overhead threatened sales and required complex workarounds to keep stores online.

The company implemented VMware SD‑WAN to run active‑active internet links with Dynamic Multipath Optimization, aggregating bandwidth, steering traffic, and duplicating packets when needed. By replacing $800/month MPLS links with cheaper ~$100 internet lines (plus LTE failover), Piston Ring achieved near‑100% uptime, dramatically fewer support calls, simpler operations, and substantial cost savings across its stores.

Piston Ring Service

Bartek Wojciechowski

Network Administrator