CLIENT SUCCESS STORIES

The Customer - SHELL & BP LTD

The worlds leading petroleum company has a major presence in the east and central African region with the Kenyan headquarters playing a critical role in driving and managing the groups operations. A leader in setting technology trends in the regional IT industry, Shell desired a major upliftment of their cabling and switching infrastructure on their LAN to accomodate their growing demands of application bandwidth, enhanced network services and manageability of their critical IT infrastructure.

Shell & BP house situated at Harambe Avenue, had a Category 5UTP cabling, with Fast Ethernet Hub's located at each of the six floors.

The Challenge

The hub-network presented enormous network bottlenecks, low speeds and undercapacity in handling the increased application overheads, in a bandwidth-port sharing configuration. As the network traffic grew with more graphic-intensive applications, this network began to choke. Shell invited bids for a high capacity, future Proof cabling solution for the HQ LAN.

The Solution

Technology Associates proposed a completely switched-network based on the latest Cisco Catalyst series of Gigabit switches, offering the following advantages:

• Dedicated 10 or 100 Mbps bandwidth to the desktop depending on network cards
• A high-switch fabric of 3.2 Gbps
• Delivering wire-speed performance across all ports
• Support for IEEE 802.1p protocol for prioritization of mission-critical @ time-sensitive applications such as voice & telephony traffic
• Auto configuration of multiple switches, on a network from one-boot server.

Technology Associates further deployed an independent core-enterprise Catalyst 4000 switch in the computer-room, which will terminate all wiring closet switches at every floor. The Catalyst 4000 switches modular chassis delivered Shell a converged wiring closet in a Switch Cluster configuration, enabling Shell to quickly configure, expand, and upgrade their networks without adding management resources.

• Scalable switching
• Multi protocol Layer 3 IP, IPX, & IP multi-cast switching
• Single IP address management @ Security (TACACAS+, port lock-down, RADIUS)
• Enterprise VLAN and Quality-of-Service (QoS)
• 24 Gbps back plane to accomodate enterprise traffic
• Better network traffic management
• Spanning Tree protocol for deterministic fast fail-over
• 6 Mpps layer 3 switching & routing of IP, IPX & IP multi-cast
• Seamlessly integrate tomorrows enterprise enhancements

In addition Technology Associates team of certified Avaya structured cabling engineers ramped up Shells cabling providing gigabit bandwidth to the port. In addition Shells backbone was collapsed to Avaya's high speed fibre optic solution. Satisfied with Technology Associates capabilities, Shell Kenya have contracted Technology Associates to manage their network switching & routing infrastructure across the country.