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| Northern & Shell Combines Forces With Foundry Networks Foundry Networks, Inc. has announced that Northern & Shell has installed Foundry's core and edge switches at its sites in Glasgow and Preston to deliver a complete end-to-end LAN solution. This is in addition to Foundry being selected as the network supplier of choice at its HQ in London. In September 2004, N&S moved its headquarters in London for 1, 200 staff to a new site in Lower Thames Street, near Blackfriars, which involved a total refurbishment, including new data centre, cabling, network infrastructure, servers, furniture and air conditioning. Foundry was chosen because its edge switch technology offered gigabit Ethernet to the desktop capability, supported legacy systems based on 10/100, were VoIP ready and could be connected to Foundry core switches using fibre links. The technology is also easy to manage – industry standard CLIs are used – and can be upgraded easily over time. Following the success of this, N&S decided to extend the relationship and selected to install Foundry core and edge switches at its regional sites. This included a disaster recovery (DR) site in Broughton (near Preston) for 120 users and an office in Glasgow for 70 staff. Foundry was the only vendor to meet N&S's technical network requirements –as well as providing a flexible solution that met with N&S's own network design. Two FastIron core switches have been implemented at each office for resilience, along with 12 FastIron workgroup switches with the project completed by Foundry reseller, Matrix Communications. N&S were particularly interested in Foundry's support for sFlow, a monitoring technology, which allows technical staff to improve network management as they can see how the network is performing right down to the byte level, without impacting on performance. write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Computing News :: home page |