Case studies: Suffolk Coastal District Council

Cisilion roll out future ready network

The customer

Suffolk Coastal District is part of the East Anglian county of Suffolk, UK. It extends from Felixstowe in the south to Walberswick in the north. Ipswich, the county town of Suffolk, borders the District to the southwest.

 

The challenge

Suffolk Coastal District Council were experiencing performance issues with applications running on their existing token-ring based FDDI network.

As the network had grown incrementally, IP addressing schemes had become complicated and difficult to manage. Rationalisation of the IP addressing scheme would allow for an easier to maintain and more efficient network.

The Council had a requirement to replace this existing network infrastructure with systems that can provide multi-Ether-channeled 1Gb-backbone capabilities, supporting the greatly increased number of servers requiring 1Gb interfaces.

Subject to a Business Case Appraisal, Suffolk Coastal District Council will be deploying a Cisco IP Telephony solution in the near future. This meant that the new infrastructure had to support the QoS (Quality of Service) requirements inherent to voice networks.

To allow for future multimedia applications the new solution had to support 100 Mbps to the desktop switched network.

Resilience in the core was another of the key requirements for this far-reaching infrastructure upgrade.

 

The solution

Cisilion have implemented five Cisco Catalyst 4506 chassis based switches. This Chassis has been designed by Cisco as a core building block for IP Telephony, which makes it an ideal platform for Suffolk Coastal District Council.

For management of the newly deployed solution Cisilion have implemented Ciscoworks SNMS (Small Network Management System). SNMS is a cut-down version of the full Ciscoworks LMS (LAN Management System) supporting up to 40 devices.

The five Catalyst 4506 switches were deployed in a redundant fibre ring. The switches were configured with MST (Multiple Spanning Tree), an improved version of the standard Spanning Tree. MST provides the fibre core of the network with instant rerouting of traffic in case one of the links used to interconnect the core switches fails.

In addition HSRP (Hot Standby Routing Protocol) has been configured on two of the core switches to provide for user default gateway redundancy. The two core switches will share a virtual IP address, used as the default gateway by the users, tracking each other's availability. In case one of the core switches fails, the other switch will take control over the virtual IP address, this way ensuring a non-interrupted service to the users.

VLAN's have been deployed to provide for a granular control of traffic and security policies as well as reducing the size of the broadcast and error domains.

All users connect to the network via 10/100 Mbps dedicated switched connections.

The benefits

This solution has provided Suffolk Coastal District Council with a core network infrastructure which both meets their current performance needs and provides room for expansion in the future.

Built with the needs of IP Telephony in mind, the solution will make Suffolk Coastal County Councils move to IP Telephony considerably easier. Converging their data and voice networks will allow the Council to remove their costly PBX based phone system, providing them with considerable cost savings in the future.