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Unified Communications Solutions
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Security Case StudyBath & North East Somerset CouncilBath and North East Somerset Council (BANES) runs from the outskirts of Bristol, south into the Mendips and east to the Southern Cotswolds and Wiltshire border. The council is responsible for serving the needs of this unique area's 170,000 population and, as a unitary authority, is charged with the delivery of all local authority services - from education to recycling, from planning to social services, from libraries to roads. As a local authority, BANES are always looking at ways in which to operate more efficiently and serve their community better. THE REQUIREMENT Bath & North East Somerset Council approached Applinet to help upgrade their existing security solution to a highly available and scalable one which would be able to provide the high levels of security and availability required, and cater for potential future growth and expansion of the user base. THE SOLUTION After an initial consultation process, Applinet plc recommended the Nortel Switched Firewall running Check Point Firewall-1. The Nortel Switched Firewall provides increased performance whilst reducing latency and enables accelerated application-level stateful inspection. These product attributes are critical for any application or services deployment that has periods of heavy demand. The solution consisted of two Nortel 5014 Directors and two 6400 Accelerators. Each Director is, in turn, paired with an Accelerator to provide the logical firewall system. These two logical systems are then configured as a highly available single cluster entity. Each logical firewall system is located at different sites which are connected by multiple fibre links. This facilitates a greater degree of availability and disaster recovery. The two logical firewalls are linked using a fibre connection to provide Check Point state synchronisation and Nortel cluster synchronisation. Each of the two sites also have a single Nortel Passport 8600 and Ethernet Routing Switch which provide the core routing switch functionality for the BANES network. The logical firewall systems utilise Split Multi-Link Trunks (SMLT) to both Ethernet and routing switches, which enables them to have a connection to both switches, so in the event of a failure with one switch, both firewall systems will still be available via the other ERS system. The solution had to provide high performance, have no element of single point of failure and be scalable to meet future proof business needs. With the advent of e-Government, the infrastructure had to be capable of meeting future traffic demands as well as capable of providing sub second failover, thus delivering 24/7 availability. THE RESULT Most resilient infrastructures are complex and difficult to troubleshoot and maintain, whereas the Switched Firewall solution provides a highly available, scalable yet simple infrastructure to support. Some of the key benefits of deploying Nortel's security solutions with Applinet include:
Similarly, BANES have a long standing relationship with Applinet and have always been impressed with the professionalism and expertise they display when dealing with any project. Their engineers are fully accredited, as highlighted by Applinet being the only Security Innovator Partner in Europe.
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