LAN Infrastructure Upgrade
Client
Welsh Country Foods are members of VION UK (VION Food Group) currently supplying lamb to the entire Asda network. Operating 24 hours a day, the site located in Anglesey is one of the highest capacity abattoirs in Europe.
Requirement
The existing Cisco LAN infrastructure had been in place for a number of years and had proved to be very reliable. The original system had been designed to provide 10/100mb connectivity to the desktop and 100mb Fibre links to 4 remote cabinet locations. All stacks had a number of switches interconnected at 100Mb also. This was a flat layer 2 network and no facility to implement Virtual LAN’s for future applications such as VOICE, Video or segmentation for security for example.
The need to provide network resilience, higher capacity network bandwidth applications and additional services to users had prompted a LAN upgrade.
Network management was also classed as a priority to ensure that all network connections could be monitored for health and failures easily, and would be simple to monitor graphically.
Solution
Phase1: Test the existing Fibre Optic infrastructure
The existing Fibre Optic infrastructure was tested over a weekend to ensure all Fibre links would support the proposed 1Gbps bandwidth requirements. All fibre connections were tested using industry standard calibrated Fluke Fibre Test equipment.
With the factory operating 24 hours every day testing was to be carried out following a timed schedule as all areas experienced a limited amount of downtime while the tests were carried out. All test results were recorded and sent to the client for future reference.
Phase2: Supply and Install New LAN Infrastructure
Having provided a number of options including Cisco 3750 Stack Wise Technology switches, Cisco 3560 switches and HP ProCurve Stackable Switches, the client selected the HP ProCurve Layer 3 stackable switches option as the preferred solution.
The HP option offered excellent value compared to the Cisco equivalent and provided all the features which WCF required including fast Layer 2 switching (153.6 Gbps switching fabric with up to 111.5 million pps), Layer 3 routing, Switch Stacking, Virtual LAN’s, Quality of Service (QOS), security using access control and Voice Ready for future voice implementations.
The main priority of this project installation was to adhere to scheduled time dependent downtime whilst ensuring key critical areas including the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems were kept online and available for ordering and despatch.
All the information required for the project was requested from the client and pre staging including configuration, upgrading to latest firmware release and testing was completed within our business centre lab. We were able to test the complete network including resilience between all 4 switch stacks offline in our lab.
Each communications cabinet was un-patched and re-patched following a patching schedule provided by Welsh Country Foods. This helped to improved cable management and identification. Using the information taken from the patching schedule we were able to logically label each switch interface with the corresponding device name. Logically labelling each interface assists with a fast and effective fault finding as any error message sent to the ProCurve Manager application contains the name of the interface, which will be the name of the edge device, server or Client PC in this case.
Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP) was implemented to ensure network resilience in the event of a fibre link break or switch failure. In the event of failure the system recovers in less than 5 seconds, in practice and testing usually losing only a single ping.
The system was tested for resiliency and basic tests performed to all critical services.
Phase3: Supply and install HP ProCurve Manager.
HP ProCurve Manager is a Microsoft Windows-based network management solution for managing HP ProCurve devices. It is a solution focused for small to medium-sized businesses that want to monitor device health, capture and browse SNMP, syslog events and map network devices. The software also creates a topology map, identifying links and logical switch stacks. The topology map can be viewed at the physical view, subnet view, agent view, region view or VLAN view
A PC was delivered to Micro Plus from the client and the HP ProCurve Manager application was installed. All switches were discovered, added to the topology map and alerts configured to email the client in the event of major failure.
Result
The Welsh Country Foods HP ProCurve LAN infrastructure provides 10/100/1000 Mbps LAN connectivity for all network devices ensuring compatibility with new and legacy equipment.
The Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP) implementation provides resilient failover in less than 5 seconds in the event of a fibre or switch failure ensuring constant network connectivity to all services for all users.
The increased bandwidth gained by use of the stacking feature of the HP ProCurve Switches and 1Gb inter stack fibre connections has greatly improved the performance from remote client systems to the centrally located servers.
HP ProCurve Manager provides a granular view of the network health using graphical based topology maps, real-time events and SMTP Email reporting when a major event occurs such as a topology change caused by a switch or link failure.
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