M&G
M&G puts its faith in a Gigabit Ethernet Solution
The Client
M&G is one of the largest fund management companies in the UK. It is the UK and European investment arm of the Prudential group with over £111 billion funds under management. M&G operates in markets where it has a leading position and competitive advantage, including retail fund management, institutional fixed income, pooled life and pension funds, property and private finance.
M&G launched the UK's first unit trust in 1931 and has continued this history of innovation over the past 70 years. M&G introduced the first 'pure' corporate bond funds to the UK with the launch of the M&G Corporate Bond Fund in 1994 and the M&G High Yield Corporate Bond Fund in 1998.
The Challenge
Fast, effective and reliable communications are critical to the success of investment management companies, where millions of pounds may be traded in seconds. In the case of M&G, its network infrastructure comprised an Ethernet network running legacy ATM technology at its core. In particular, ATM imposed a limit of 155Mbps on the backbone, and the Nortel equipment upon which it was based was fast becoming obsolete which was making support both expensive and problematic.
M&G decided that an upgrade of its LAN was required to deliver increased performance and functionality, and provide a flexible, scalable, future-proof network as a platform for future development. Key requirements were for a Gigabit Ethernet backbone capable of supporting the delivery of bandwidth intensive applications to dealing floors, and for a Layer 3 switched network infrastructure that would support the potential rollout of IP-based communications in future such as Voice and Video.
In addition to these technical requirements, M&G also sought the assistance of a partner to implement the new network who had a thorough understanding of both Nortel and Cisco environments. It was also necessary to ensure a smooth migration of users from the existing Nortel infrastructure to the new network with minimum risk of downtime and disruption to the business.
The Solution
M&G went out to tender for the network project and after an extensive review of the different technologies and responses, the company selected a Cisco-based solution designed by Logicalis.
Logicalis produced an exceptionally detailed and well thought out migration and commissioning plan, which included pre-staging and Nortel/Cisco interoperability (a complex aspect of the project considering that the client was running ATM). This served to demonstrate that Logicalis possessed a detailed understanding of both Nortel and Cisco environments, and gave the client confidence that the risk of any downtime during the project would be minimised.
Logicalis proposed a highly resilient network design based on proven three-tier architecture. At the centre of the network is a resilient pair of Cisco Catalyst 6509 switches, providing a high availability scalable platform for network services at the Core of the network, including Layer 3 routing and interfaces to WAN links. Cisco 3550 distribution switches, located on each of the four main floors of the seven-storey building, are also deployed in a resilient architecture and connect to Cisco 2950 24-port switches (at the Access Layer) which deliver services to the users and form the basic building blocks of the network and are deployed throughout the building. This design minimises the failure domain to a maximum of 48 user ports and protects critical applications with resilient server connectivity.
Network management is provided by Cisco Works integrated into M&G's existing HP OpenView system, and network security is provided by a Cisco Secure Access Control Server platform which provides authorisation, authentication and accounting for all access to Cisco network devices.
As well as network design, implementation and supply of all equipment Logicalis also provided M&G with a fully tailored support package, including a two-hour engineer and hardware response, to ensure that the network remains highly available throughout its life.
The Bottom Line
During the implementation phase the migration from the old to the new infrastructure proceeded on schedule without a hitch, and was transparent to most users apart from a noticeable increase in reliability and reduction in down time.
As a result of this upgrade, Logicalis has replaced an ageing and unreliable LAN with a more reliable, faster network that not only satisfies M&G's immediate requirements, but will also grow with the business and support the rollout of new IP-based communications technologies in the future.