Company Introduction:
This customer is a European Investment Banking group that provides investment banking services to corporate clients, and has over 140 employees. It operates financial extranet services that require high availability so they needed a reliable provider with stringent SLAs
The Issues and Requirements
The customer wanted a network that conformed to their business continuity strategy. Specifically, they requested geographically distributed, high-availability firewall services across two sites. As such, resilience and diversity were key and availability of services was critical.
The main challenge was to create redundant firewalls, using active/active technology, between their sites in London and the dedicated DR facility.
The Solution
Hybrid solution:- We created a hybrid solution for this customer, using both Layer 2 (installation of an Ethernet Demarcation Device) and Layer 3 (use of routers) technologies.
VPLS zones:- Three VPLS services were created on the network in order to extend the three zones of the firewall between the two geographically dispersed offices, these zones were: Trusted, untrusted and DMZ. This achieved the goal of running an active/active firewall solution across the two offices. It also reduced costs for the customer as they didn’t need to buy any additional firewalls and connectivity to set up a resilient firewall.
Resilience;- To accommodate their requirements for resiliency, we ran the internet direct into the firewall which meant the customer achieved resilience in the core.
SLAs:- We were able to give the customer a specific SLA for their solution to cater for their unique QoS requirements. One of the customer’s critical business applications was thin client services. The two regional northern sites were mainly populated with users accessing services in the London HQ using thin client services. Exponential-e configured a QoS class of service specifically to provide latency guarantees for this critical application. Average latencies achieved are 11ms London to Manchester and 15ms London to Edinburgh.
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