National Trust for Scotland deploys Brocade to improve network infrastructure

'We now have 40 GbE connection speeds up and down the stack, which is a massive improvement on what we had before,' says head of IT Scott Newton

The National Trust for Scotland has selected Brocade to implement a network infrastructure to "reduce complexity" and boost resilience.

With responsibility for 190,000 acres of countryside, The National Trust for Scotland has 130 separate sites across the country supported by a core network that hadn't been upgraded for some time. As a result, the Trust struggled to meet the needs of it 540 full-time and 750 seasonal employees.

"Our existing core IT infrastructure was certainly in need of an update," said Scott Newton, head of IT, National Trust for Scotland, who described how the Trust's IT team was beginning to feel the strain.

"Although as an organisation we take conservation very seriously, there was a risk that this was starting to extend to our network as well. This meant that our IT team was having to spend more and more time just keeping things up and running," he continued.

"As user demand for connectivity and bandwidth continues to grow, we simply would not have been able to cope. We needed to invest in an infrastructure that would allow staff to access the online resources they need, quickly and reliably," Newton added.

As a result, the National Trust for Scotland examined the different options that were available to it in order to improve its network infrastructure, before coming to the conclusion that Brocade "offered the best fit for our organisation".

"As a charity, we always need to make sure that we're getting good value for the money," Newton explained.

In this case, that meant that we needed a solution that was cost-effective but that would also give us the functionality we would need in the long term," he continued, adding that having become aware of Brocade's offerings he was "confident that they would be able to deliver the future-proof network that we wanted."

The National Trust for Scotland has now deployed Brocade VDX®6730 switches across its core network, a move that has seen the organisation improve network utilisation through increased scalability and simplified network architecture. It's a project that Newton described as "hugely successful".

"We now have 40 GbE connection speeds up and down the stack, which is a massive improvement on what we had before," he said.

"Our core infrastructure is now also far more reliable and resilient, which has significantly improved the experience for our users and helped the IT team to spend time on other projects, rather than focusing on just keeping the network up and running," Newton concluded.

Earlier this year, Doncaster and Bassetlaw NHS Trust deployed a Brocade solution in order to aid its digital shift.