Dutch Growers is a family-oriented plant nursery and lifestyle. They’ve been helping Saskatoonians find plants for their houses, source inspirational centerpieces, and start their own gardens since 1953! From their 80-acre local nursery, Dutch growers supplies Saskatoon with starter plants for the beginning of the growing season and all year round. It was the start of the growing season and Dutch growers should be in full swing of their busiest time of the year, but due to the COVID –19 pandemic the store only has a limited capacity making customer flow is more important than ever.
On May 2nd, 2020 the internet at their location stopped working. The tills could not process transactions and customers could not leave (unless they wanted to abandon their carefully selected new garden plans). This also meant that a line was beginning to form outside as no one was able to enter the building either, due public health safety restrictions. The pressure was on us to find a solution fast! We swiftly discovered that there was a device on the network that had malfunctioned and was flooding the Dutch Growers local connections with digital noise, overwhelming the connections of anything connected to the network keeping them from communicating with each other or the internet.
This fateful day fell on a Saturday, so Dustin reached out to the on-call technician at Complete Technologies for assistance. Complete Technologies technician Dylan was connected remotely in less than 5 minutes and arrived at Dutch Growers shortly after that. Dustin used a mobile hotspot to get the tills on a separated from the network and Dylan got to work looking for what was causing the broadcast storm. Because of the way the network is structured at Dutch Growers there was no way to trace the source to an individual machine without physically tracing each cable down its length. This was not a one-person job and Dylan called in another technician from Complete Technologies to help. While the focus that day was on speed and minimizing down time, Justin and Dylan were able to solve the short-term issue, and look ahead to prevent this issue from happening in the future. They organized the cables connected to the main switch to make it easier to identify devices on the network in the future. Together they were able to disconnect the main switch from the network and isolate 4 main network connections that seemed to be the cause of all the noise.
Network and internet connectivity had been restored! The Ethernet cables in the server cabinet had gotten straightened out and Rick [Dutch Growers Owner] was determined to track down the malfunctioning network equipment. That day Dutch Growers and Complete Technologies collaborated to finalize the planning stage of their building-wide network infrastructure overhaul. We incorporated both design and technology to make Dutch Growers more resilient to combat any potential downtime and made their network easier to manage and maintain overall.