International law firm Allen & Overy has reached the
midway point in a £4.5m project to link its datacentre and global
locations via a state-of-the-art Cisco metropolitan area
network.
The aim is to create an infrastructure that is available 100% of
the time, said Andrew Brammer, head of global IT operations at
Allen & Overy.
The company has about 4,700 staff, including 430 partners, who
work in 25 offices around the world.
In July 2005, it contracted Fibernet, a bespoke network service
provider, to set up a managed optical fibre network linking its
sites.
The datacentre, located at the Winnersh Triangle in Berkshire,
is managed by service provider Savvis. When the project is
completed, the fibre network will connect the datacentre to the law
firm's offices in Canary Wharf and its new headquarters in Bishops
Square, London.
Allen & Overy said it planned to move from its present
offices in St Paul's to the Bishops Square site by November
2006.
The network to the datacentre is now live.
The remaining part of the programme involves building and
commissioning the Fibernet network so that it extends to the Canary
Wharf and Bishops Square offices.
Brammer said, "The main business driver for undertaking a
managed network of this nature is risk management. We are
separating our people from our data.
By doing this we are protecting two of the most critical
elements of our business: our transactional data and our
intellectual capital."
The company plans to use the fibre network to run 2,500 IP
phones linked to Cisco's Call Manager application and to set up
global video conferencing and functions such as universal inboxes,
in 2007.
Technology chosen for high availability
Allen & Overy's metropolitan area network is based on
Cisco's ONS15454 Multiservice Transport Platform, running in
parallel in a dual-chassis and dual-ring configuration.
This provides high levels of availability between the different
locations, enabling the law firm to gain fast transactional data
transfer, back-up and recovery, and networked access to storage,
said global head of IT operations Andrew Brammer.