The NEC and CERN give their LANs a boost

The National Exhibition Centre (NEC), a 620-acre complex in Solihull that puts on more than 140 trade and consumer exhibitions every year, is in the process of replacing 90 legacy LAN switches with 120 new dual core Alcatel-Lucent OS6400 devices designed to consolidate multiple LANs into a single network entity and reduce points of failure.

“Before we had a range of services built up over time – separate networks for voice, data, video and security – and our aim was to create a single, flat system that we could manage centrally,” says NEC group IT director Andrew McManus.

“The last thing we want is customers turning up at the show looking for an uncontended 4Mbit/s connection and finding they can get 500Kbit/s or nothing, so we wanted to create links that do not run out of capacity.”

A 10Gbit/s fibre backbone links the core switches through a lot of Cat5 cabling and is rolled out to individual stands on the day depending on where it is needed. The switches also extend Wi-Fi connectivity into the NEC’s roof spaces to support both exhibitor and visitor access and a new IP CCTV system, which uses high-resolution pan, tilt and zoom (PTZ) digital cameras.

The NEC recently started using network management platform OmniVista to provide a “single, starship view” of the entire infrastructure.

“Before we had only rudimentary monitoring tools, which relied on one person with a lot of network management experience to understand the switches and handle them when they went down. It was also a labour-intensive job, but using OmniVista is much simpler,” says McManus.

Like the NEC, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN – pictured above) was looking to extend network access within its campus when it recently upgraded to HP’s E6600, E5412, E8212 and E3500 intelligent edge switches, though its prime concern was increasing bandwidth.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider generates around 15 petabytes of data per year, which is streamed constantly between CERN’s five datacentres in Switzerland and France, and to other facilities around the world.

“We are doubling the performance of the infrastructure every 18 to 24 months by using more and more high-end kit, and doubling the core at the same time,” says Jean-Michel Jouanigot, CERN communication systems group leader, who is responsible for all forms of networking, desktop PCs, industrial process control and high-performance computing (HPC) within the organisation.

CERN also upgraded its datacentre WAN links by replacing Force10 Networks routers with Brocade’s 100 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) capable MLXe core routers last year, which will eventually boost current bandwidth to 160Gbit/s.

Because they process so many thousands of visitors every year, both the NEC and CERN need to make sure that their LANs are built on standardised wired and wireless equipment that can be configured to provide access to whatever devices people bring with them.

“Cable will never go away because people want a guaranteed service, but the trouble is we never know what people are going to bring to the event or what their data requirements will be until they get here – some bring in printing presses or standard stuff showing soft furnishings, for example, but we also get the Gadget Show where they can bring in all sorts of laptops, tablet PCs and other internet-enabled devices,” says McManus.

CERN is also making the move to faster 802.11n Wi-Fi, with up to 800 base stations already in situ and more planned.

“802.11b/g is limited in what it can do and we have up to 10,000 visitors a year that bring their own stuff with them, meaning the network has to support access from all types of equipment and compatibility with all sorts of devices, anything from laptops to oscilloscopes and other strange devices,” says Jouanigot.

The NEC network also supports the venue’s e-commerce activities, which can see massive demand for bandwidth when tickets for headline acts like George Michael or Take That first become available. As yet, the venue has not implemented IPv6, handling IP addresses in the meantime using a combination of network address translation (NAT) and dynamic host connection protocol (DHCP).

“Our first step was to migrate the hardware and deliver network resilience, but there is a wider intelligence layer in the network now that allows us to do more in the future, and we will look at migrating to IPv6 as part of that,” says McManus.
CERN is making the move to IPv6 now. Although Jean-Michel says that the organisation itself has enough IPv4 addresses for its own needs, CERN uses web casting and collaboration applications that rely on IPv6 multicast capabilities to connect with others in various parts of the world.

“We have partners in China and other APAC countries that do have a problem [with IPv4] and because we are an open organisation we have to support IPv6 in order to communicate with them,” he says.