Case studies

With over 15,000 students year on year, Peterborough Regional College is one of the major colleges of further and higher education. Having a good infrastructure is mission critical for the College, whose customer service has to be of a high quality standard at all times. The College’s LAN network is able to host 1100 concurrent PC users, and services 13,000 user accounts, including staff and students.

The Requirement

With a single Passport Switch, the LAN network presented the weakness of a single point of failure. The day to day activity of the College relies heavily on the communication network: projectors in the classrooms are set up to work over IP and the internet connection is dependent on the LAN network. The impact of a network failure on staff and students was unacceptable. The network had to be made more resilient by addressing the single point of failure risk.

Why Nortel and Applinet

The College has had a Nortel network in place for many years. As the network has worked well, with no technical issues, there was no reason to think of replacing it. Building on the existing infrastructure was the obvious best value solution. The College worked with Applinet before. “Applinet has always offered excellent customer care. We wanted to work with a company that were big enough to have the resources, and at the same time be flexible, responsive and able to offer us a personalised service” says Pete Griffiths, the College’s Network Manager.

The Solution

To increase the resilience of the network, an additional Ethernet Routing Switch (ERS) 8600 was installed and connected to the existing switch through Split Multilink Trunking (SMLT). This would ensure that, in a switch failure situation, the other switch would take over and keep the network functioning with no noticeable difference to the users. The work had to be carried out during a half term period, and had to be finished within a week. Applinet completed the work within the agreed timelines. “I have always been happy with Applinet. We are getting from them the same high quality service we have always expected” says Pete Griffiths.

Benefits

 The most important benefit of the project has been the increased resilience of the data network. The LAN network now has the reliability and robustness necessary to fulfil its mission critical role and provide the College’s student and staff with a virtually risk free communication environment.