Jaguar and Land Rover have completed the installation of an
£8m network that has boosted bandwidth between three sites in the
Midlands by a factor of 40.
The network, which was completed last month, has replaced a 45mbps
connection with one of 2gbps (expandable to 10gbps) and cut
per-megabit costs to 6% of former levels.
It has allowed the Ford-owned companies to guarantee the transfer
of design and production information that is vital for car
production, as well as the rationalisation of servers across sites,
which had been impossible because bandwidth was limited.
In one project to implement hardware for a £750,000 product design
initiative, costs were reduced by £150,000 as a result of being
able to share infrastructure between sites.
Ron Murdoch, project planning manager for Jaguar-Land Rover, said,
"We were running out of capacity and needed more resilience. We
started looking two years ago but the cost was prohibitive. Now
providers have the cable and it is 50% cheaper than it was
then.
"In the past we had to move people and equipment when we initiated
projects - now we have bandwidth that puts us at the top of
business class and just under carrier class. We have made the wide
area network like the local area network."
The implementation is of a scale and resilience that is commonplace
in the City of London, but is unusual for an industrial company
outside the capital.
It has been made possible by the development of dense wavelength
division multiplexing (DWDM) - the latest in high-bandwidth fibre
optic cabling. By separating channels into distinct wavelengths, a
single cable can give up to 32 channels of 10gbps each, removing
the need for multiple cables .
Ian Keene, an analyst with Gartner, said, "DWDM has brought the
cost of such high bandwidth connections down. The glut of bandwidth
following the telecoms slump has also seen prices shoot
down."
The network is designed as a triangle linking the three sites so
that if any connection is severed traffic can be routed the other
way. No single point of failure has been allowed, with two comms
rooms on each site supplied by separate electricity sub-stations.
"If we stop communicating, we stop building cars," said
Murdoch.
The Lan is based on Cisco equipment. Nortel devices predominate in
the Wan. Most of the DWDM fibre is provided by Energis.