The benefits
After carefully reviewing all options, it was decided that Vtesse Networks were best equipped to meet these network requirements for the following reasons:
- Flexibility - access throughout the UK. Bandwidth is upgradeable to many tens of Gbps in days and in scaleable increments. Unlike tariff based services, this can be done at marginal cost
- Low network delay - point-to-point, dedicated, non-route switched connections, at the speed of light; provide imperceptible delay of less than 0.5 milliseconds over 100 Km; latency guaranteed in SLA
- Protocol independent - carries any storage or data protocol (and voice over IP) in native format
- Future proofed - no network overhead; no need for specialised WAN support skills
- Dependable - Vtesse Networks, uniquely, provide back-up routes with no single points of failure and diversity guaranteed over every route-metre
Server Consolidation Case Study
Customer profile
This well-known company was founded in the first half of the nineteenth century to alleviate the hardship of families facing misfortune. Today its Life and Pensions business pays out an average of £12 million pounds every working day and is underwritten by investments of over £60 billion.
Its published corporate strategy is to grow its market share by, among other things, "Applying technology and e-commerce to enhance distribution, improve service and reduce costs".
Business requirements
For historic reasons, the company's business is managed from three main offices in different parts of the country. This has resulted in a need for separate IT facilities at each site. The business wanted to minimise this duplication of resources with an optical networking infrastructure that would give staff at each location access to a single set of IT services.
As well as reducing costs, the company wanted to enhance the service to its clients by removing many of the problems associated with managing multiple copies of the same data.
A further benefit would be the freedom to locate staff, over time, to where they would be most-effective irrespective of where servers were located.
The challenge
These business demands called for a network with some challenging characteristics. It had to:
- Be so fast that users would never, ever, see any difference between accessing in-house or remote servers
- Maintain the flexibility to adapt to requirements for relocation of operational and business-continuity sites following de-mutualisation, restructuring and acquisition activities
- Support a rapidly evolving IT and DR strategy without constraints on the choice of communication or storage protocols