The Fenton Herriott Vineyards is a family-owned winery in Placerville, CA that is intimately involved in every part of the vintner process – from vineyard maintenance to the grape crush, fermentation and barrel aging, to bottling and direct to consumer sales.   Like most wineries, the Fenton Herriott Vineyards has vineyards, a wine cellar, tasting room, and outside facilities used to host special events for customers and wine club members. 

Like many businesses, at the winery, the internet is a critical piece of being able to service customers and process credit card sales.  Also like many small businesses, the winery has a small staff and “they know nothing about networking” comments Guy Herriott, Owner of Fenton Herriott Vineyards.  Ensuring internet connectivity and being able to identify and remotely correct potential issues without impact to customer sales and transactions is critical for the winery.

The winery installed the Tallac ECP-100-5P for site connectivity and to ensure internet connectivity and support for critical credit card transactions.  The ECP100-5P has provided many benefits to the winery including improved internet uptime, load balancing and failover of traffic, improved network performance and VPN access, and the ability to remotely reset the modem to allow rapid recovery of internet connectivity.

The ECP100-5P monitors internet access at the winery and supports multiple DSL modems at the site and load balances and provides failover of traffic across links appropriately if needed.  If the physical DSL lines are having issues, as often occurs during winter storms, the ECP100-5P fails over primary traffic to the USB LTE modem until the internet can be recovered.  The USB LTE link also provides a highly reliable way to reach the internet for reporting networking performance and providing VPN access if remote debugging is needed.  Email alerts also provide a reliable way of being notified of network issues without relying on an employee to report these issues. 

 “If an issue can be solved by a simple reset of the DSL modem, which is the solution most of the time, the ECP100-5P can do this automatically and remotely.  This saves valuable time in restoring the internet, especially if no one is on site capable of diagnosing the issue and performing the DSL modem reset” commented Guy.    “The ECP100-5P plays a critical role in helping to ensure our internet and customer credit card sales are up and running without having to have a local IT expert at the winery” adds Guy “which allows us to focus on what we are passionate about  - the wine!”