Case Study
Business Continuity

Customer profile

With 6,764 employees, offices in 18 countries, and $400 billion of assets under management, this global fund management company has a significant presence in the institutional, retail, and defined contribution markets in North America, Europe, and Asia. It has become one of the largest independent global investment managers and continues to deliver outstanding investment performance and service across a full range of investment products.

Business requirements

The requirement was for LAN based Gigabit connectivity between multiple sites that are geographically separated. This was to allow for the transfer of data between its offices and data centre/disaster recovery centre. A key requirement was that all fibre routes should be completely diverse from the existing incumbents' fibre. Latency was also a critical factor as staff perform disk mirroring and backups between sites.
The company was also looking at ways to consolidate server processing and storage between locations in order to reduce operational costs and allow centralised backup and management.

The challenge

These business demands called for a network with some challenging characteristics. It had to:

• Be so fast that users could access remote locations as if they were in the same office
• Be fully diverse with no common or single points of failure
• Offer scalability in terms of the capacity of the connections from a single GigE to multiple GigE's at low marginal cost
• Offer low latency between sites