ProPac

Situation - The DVLA in Swansea plays a pivotal role in the licensing of all vehicles in the UK and is recognised in Europe for its highly efficient operation. With an increase in the number of cars on our roads, the DVLA has had to grow its workforce to maintain its quality of public service.

Problem - A five building site with some 3000+ users has outgrown the existing campus environment. Exceptional growth has forced the acquisition of an additional building. Located some 5km away from the main campus, the new building was required to support all existing applications over the Token Ring/ATM infrastructure.

In addition to supporting the legacy SNA applications, a new resilient Gigabit infrastructure was required to run in parallel to the Token Ring/ATM infrastructure to support new UNIX based IP applications.

Implication - The lack of sufficient infrastructure capacity would impact the user response time and overall service support to the business. This in turn would have a detrimental effect on this public institution renowned for its efficiency.

Need - To design, develop and implement an effective networking infrastructure with particular attention to the business requirements and existing infrastructure.

Business Solution

Scope - 3net provided high-level design, detailed design and implementation services for the project. In order to achieve the required level of resilience the ATM core was re-designed to support PNNI from the existing IISP implementation. This configuration allowed the dynamic re-routing of Source Route Bridged (SRB) traffic without end station intervention.

Solution - This allowed Routing Information Fields (RIF) on client workstations and routers to remain consistent in the event of a failure, and hence remove the requirement to reboot workstations to recover from failures within the network. Each Token Ring segment had connections to two ATM/Frame switches achieving the customer's goal to reduce single points of failure within the network to a minimum. Application testing post implementation shows, time sensitive SNA sessions are now tolerant of failure within the network without user intervention.

The ATM/Token Ring solution was originally implemented to address growth requirements, with a parallel Gigabit layer-3 switching project in the satellite site, with Fast Ethernet connectivity, for client connections. High availability was paramount in this environment as senior management considered extended hours working.

3net provided design, implementation and testing services for the project. Again working closely with onsite staff the deployment gave ample bandwidth for user growth. Each layer-2 switch cluster has connectivity to multiple layer-3 switches giving an aggregate trunk bandwidth of 2Gbs per cluster.

Each Gigabit connection was located on separate units ensuring no single point of failure existed per cluster. Additional resilience was added by configuring the workstations with a default gateway address that was shared between layer-3 switches. Thus ensuring failure of a layer-3 switch would not render remote services in accessible. The scalability of the design has allowed an additional site to satellite office to be subsequently added to the original satellite office without the need to re-engineer the environment.

Business Benefits

Maintaining the existing service levels and user response time was a key goal in the implementation. 3net worked in close partnership at all stages to understand the business requirements, and designed a solution using these as the prime factor. 3net are still working in close partnership on an onward going basis, helping the IT team to deliver solutions to meet business requirements.

A tight integration between business requirements and IT deliverables has enabled DVLA to develop a networking infrastructure, which provides effective support to the business, today, and flexibility to accommodate growth in the future.