Midlands-based Warwickshire County Council oversees 18 towns and has a population of over 500,000. Its Warwick-based high performance data centre is responsible for delivering a range of applications to the Council’s Directorates (Departments) including Active Directory, SQL, Citrix and VMWare ESX.
Five years ago, primarily as a space saving measure, Warwickshire County Council commenced a network and storage blade server strategy to enable a high density data centre solution. In 2008 it was decided the Council’s HP p-Class blade server systems needed upgrading and expanding with the latest blade server technology. This was to enable more efficient hosting of existing and planned third-party applications and also to support VMware to provide the operational and cost benefits of a more virtualised high density computing environment. Key requirements were total blade server switch interoperability with the existing Alcatel core network and also in-built network management capabilities to enable failover between server switches.
After considering various data centre network vendor alternatives, including Cisco, Warwickshire County Council decided upon an industry standards open systems solution and selected HP BladeSystem c-Class blade server solutions running integrated Ethernet layer 2/3 Ethernet switch modules from BLADE Network Technologies. These switches were recommended by HP as being recognised for the lowest power consumption and fastest wire-speed performance in their class as well as the lowest cost. With 7.5 million data ports, BLADE’s proven products connect millions of server and storage systems at 350 of the Fortune 500 worldwide.
The overall solution has enabled an enhanced high speed, low latency, low power and low cost data centre networking environment at Warwick while ensuring the pre-requisite compatibility with the Alcatel network. In addition, BLADE Network Technologies switches were shown to dramatically reduce the number of Ethernet cables attached to the rear of the HP blade enclosures while adding sophisticated network intelligence including a Hotlink feature to enable the required server switch failover facility.
As a result of the more streamlined, responsive and high performance computing environment for its users the Council is also able to benefit the local community by providing highly optimised eServices.
System Overview:
The 48 Gbps HP GbE2c Layer 2/3 Ethernet Blade Switch (GbE2c Layer 2/3) provides a full set of Layer 2 switching and Layer 3 routing features, sixteen internal downlinks, five uplinks and two internal crossconnects in a single low cost blade switch. Each module has 21 ports and a power consumption of 30 watts.
package.
HP Advanced Function Software is a three year subscription program that enables owners of HP BladeSystem switches made by BLADE Network Technologies to deploy enterprise-class virtual network services. By purchasing this subscription service, customers can augment the capabilities of existing HP BladeSystem Switches.
For more details see:
HP GbE2c Layer 2/3 Ethernet Blade Switch
Advanced Functionality Software
Visit: www.bladenetwork.net Twitter: @BLADENetwork.
Recent Comments