BACKGROUND
Yorkshire Water‟s strategic vision is to be „clearly the best water company‟ in the UK. Every day, they supply over 1 billion litres of drinking water to over 2 million customers. As part of Yorkshire Water‟s business expansion, Livingstone House at Clarence Dock, Leeds was selected as the base for a newly created asset delivery team; a multi-organisational team, made up of staff from Yorkshire Water and up to twelve external business partners. Charlie Haysom, head of Yorkshire Water's asset delivery team, said: "Our new location will enable us to strengthen relationships with our working partners by bringing them all together under one roof alongside our own colleagues. This collaborative approach will help us to focus more than ever on delivering the challenging programme of investment we have planned over the next five years, to ensure that we continue to offer our customers the very best level of service at the lowest possible price."
The network had to be able to emulate this highly collaborative approach, whereby up to 550 users must be able to sit at any desk in the building, connect to the shared physical network infrastructure, be able to access the relevant organisations internal systems, whilst at the same time use shared network resources such as printers.
SOLUTION
SICL worked closely with senior Yorkshire Water network engineers to design a solution that addressed the following:
- Security
- Performance
- Agility
- Resilience
- Scalability
- Excellent User experience
- Low operational costs
The joint technical team implemented resilient Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches, each containing a Firewall Services Module, allowing virtual routers and firewalls to be configured for each of the external partners and other security domains. Each floor contains a resilient stack of Cisco Catalyst 3750 access switches, which connect to the Core switches using multiple 10Gbps connections. All uplinks are utilised, and there are no STP-blocked ports in the network. Secure „hot-desking‟ was provided using IEEE 802.1X port-based access security. Windows credentials are checked to authenticate the user and identify the organisation to which the user belongs. This information is used by the access switch to either deny or grant user access, and automatically place the port in the appropriate VLAN.
RESULT
An excellent example of SICL network specialists, working in partnership to deliver a network that provides Yorkshire Water with a network infrastructure that is fast, functional, secure, resilient, scalable, flexible and manageable. Virtualisation lends itself to a very agile network, allowing additional partners to be quickly enabled without requiring additional equipment. In addition, this model optimises processing, bandwidth, space and power utilization. Additionally, dynamic port VLAN allocation reduces the administrative overhead, and manpower costs, traditionally associated with networks that have multiple security
domains.
“SICL‟s highly experienced consultants were able to immediately understand our challenging business requirements and translate them into a network design that provides the features required of a world-class network, whilst at the same time removing the issues historically associated with multi-tenanted buildings."
David Nussey
Network Technologies Manager
Yorkshire Water