BACKGROUND
Jephson Housing Association, established in 1970, is a not-for-profit organisation and is now one of the largest housing associations in the UK managing 13,500 homes. The network has 700 users based between the head office and 11 remote office sites and also a number of tele-workers.
SICL was initially contracted by Jephson Housing to provide a report on the performance of the local area networks
at all UK offices after a period of organisational growth and then to design a fully resilient, secure and scaleable
network supporting data, voice and video applications.
APPROACH
The analysis report provided a complete network risk analysis giving detailed insight into the running of the network
and application performance including: traffic monitoring, health checks of active hardware and physical
infrastructure, a full topology diagram and types of traffic traversing the network.
The analysis showed that broadcast storms and growing use of the network were major contributions to slow
response times and costly periods of downtime. The natural growth cycle of the organisation was having a major
affect on the network.
SOLUTION
SICL designed a WAN (Wide Area Network) based on MPLS via BT’s ‘IP Clear’ with ISDN back-up lines to all sites,
a flexible solution which enables Jephson Housing to easily add new locations, as required, and allow many types of connections. Connectivity is provided through a 100Mb flex link at the Head Office, 2mb links at seven of the larger sites and ADSL links at three of the smaller offices. A LES10 link, between the Head Office and a remote location, provides the organisation with a reliable, resilient and predictable failover network with QoS (Quality of Service). The new LAN (Local Area Network), at the Head Office, is fully re-cabled to CAT6 standard and the network core is based on Cisco 6500 managed switch technology, which works to ease migration and expansion. The LAN design and configuration provides a voice and data backbone with maximum resilience and bandwidth controls to prioritise traffic.
RESULTS
The IT department at Jephson Housing has seen significant improvements since the deployment of the new network. Congestion is now minimised due to traffic direction and prioritisation, and through the management functions it can now detect faults, troubleshoot, monitor and administer the network more efficiently.
"The network was growing and so were the performance issues. After implementing SICL’s solution we have seen significant improvements in performance and now have greater control over the network. Now the network is now more reliable and robust and is able to grow quickly and easily inline with the business itself, with only a limited amount of additional investment."
Ian Neal
IT Manager
Jephson Housing