IT and business service company the Sema Group favoured 3Com’s
network switch products when it needed to concentrate its staff in
one location
Corporate networks are now under more pressure than ever before,
and large corporate companies need an IT infrastructure that they
can rely on. Sema Group chose 3Com as a preferred supplier for the
company's network and customer showcase in its new London offices
to build a resilient, fault tolerant solution.
Sema Group is one of the world's leading information technology and
business services companies, providing clients with specialist
knowledge in systems integration, outsourcing and consultancy
services. With a turnover of £1,250 billion, Sema Group serves
clients in the strategic markets:Telecommunications; Finance;
Services and Transport; Public Sector; DefenceIndustry and Energy.
Major customers include the DSS, Olivetti, Ericsson, Railtrack,
Standard Chartered BankFollowing the company's acquisition of BR
Business Systems, Sema Group was looking to consolidate its
resources and concentrate its staff from the many offices it had
inherited to one location. This, it was felt, would bring
performance benefits and ease the maintenance and day-to-day
running of the business and its IT systems.From choosing its new
offices in Triton Square, London, the pressure was on to select,
design and implement a network infrastructure in three months. Sema
Group also needed a very modular design that could be easily
adapted as the company developed.Companies around the world are now
totally dependent on their information systems to manage their
organisations effectively and control core business processes. Sema
Group's clients rely on the company to support them without
failure. Sema Group in turn, cannot afford to have a failure on its
network which would take its systems down, affecting the service to
its clients and jeopardising the clients' profitability.Users
demand transparent access to network resources at any time.
Competition together with constant improvements in technology means
that companies have to run their networks at the greatest
efficiency and performance levels possible. The quality of
information technology systems often defines the growth of a
company, and networks must be implemented correctly to withstand
the growing levels of traffic while improving levels of customer
service and cutting costs.Robin Farr, IT manager at Sema Group,
understands how crucial it is that a company must get it right when
implementing a new network: "It is not acceptable to have any
network outages. Our projects for clients are charged on a per day
basis. Both Sema Group and the client can lose money if our systems
go down."The Triton Square offices accommodate staff working on
consulting projects, systems support and application development
for clients. There are approximately 600 employees in the building,
a large number of meeting rooms and project bids for new business
are also held at these offices.The Triton Square site is the
largest Sema Group local area network to date, with the previous
largest site supporting 300 users. "It is dictated by the business
that the system needs to be highly resilient. There are easily 20
to 30 projects going on in the building at any one time," says
Farr. "We have learnt from experience that it is essential to
remove the environment for a single point of failure."The new
network was designed for 1,200 active points calculated at a ratio
of two points per person. This was due to the constantly changing
work environment of today's IT professionals. A network has to be
flexible enough to accommodate the consultants' need to be able to
move around the building and still have access to the network. In
addition, many consultants and support technicians now require more
than one computer to be linked to a network at a given time.Sema
Group opted to use two CoreBuilder 9000 Enterprise Switches which
are the networks switching and routing centre, supporting real-time
traffic flows and reducing the cost of ownership of the network due
to their management and fault tolerant features. "We have Gigabit
Ethernet in the backbone, and are using SuperStack II 3900s for
peripherals to run 10/100Mb to the desktop," explained Farr.
"Having two CoreBuilder 9000s means that should we decide to move
the system, this can be done in stages, and the network can be kept
running."A high level of network management was also required. The
network is currently running at both 10 and 100Mbit Ethernet to the
desktop, but Sema Group is undergoing a technology refresh where
within three months the entire building is planned to be running at
100Mbit.The site will be managed from Birmingham, where 3Com's
Transcend management software was purchased specifically to run the
Triton Square network, running on HP OpenView on the Unix platform.
"We feel that Transcend is especially good at managing the network
from end to end, and provides the level of control that we need,"
says Farr. The application delivers complete system-wide control of
the network components. Graphical representations of the network
show colour-coded port status in real time, as well as statistics
that show traffic and error loads. Creation, configuration, and
management of resilient pair hub or switch ports provide fault
tolerance in client/server LANs. Automatic upgrade and
administration can be undertaken and backups of configuration
information can be easily performed.The Remote Monitoring tool
draws on data collected from SmartAgents and from Transcend and
SuperStack II Enterprise Monitors to provide a comprehensive,
graphical view of LAN and enterprise network activity. This is a
key component in providing fault tolerance to the system.
(c)
Sema Group 1999Geoff Marshall