Drinks and snacks company, Cantrell & Cochrane (C&C) is upgrading the local area networks (LANs) in its 12 offices across the country from Token Ring technology, to Ethernet-based systems in a rollout that will cost EUR200,000.
The new networks for C&C Group, a large Irish supplier of soft drinks and savoury snacks, will be installed over the next 18 months by Datapac and will be based on technology and products provided by 3Com.
The current Token Ring network, based on old IBM technology, runs at 16Mbit/s with a throughput of approximately 12Mbit/s. The new 3Com Gigabit Ethernet switched network will run at 100Mbit/s to begin with but, according to C&C IT director Pat Rowan, once individual PCs and network cards are upgraded, speeds will rise closer to the backbone speed of 1000Mbit/s as the need arises.
‘The new infrastructure will speed traffic along six to eight times faster than the previous network and so will result in increased productivity and performance,’ said Rowan. ‘The new network will assist in resolving bandwidth issues and eliminate local network jams. It will be far easier to access whatever data is required, whenever it’s needed, right across the network.’
The implementation is based on 3Com SuperStack 4060s at the core and 3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4400SEs at the edge of the network. The 3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4400SE 24-port 10/100 switch delivers high speed performance for enterprise networks.
‘When it came to upgrading to a fully switched network, the 3Com Gigabit Ethernet switches seemed a natural choice,’ said Rowan. Tenders were also considered from Avaya (C&W), Cisco and Nortel (IBM). Datapac is a long-time supplier to C&C.
‘Token Ring has been fading out because Ethernet is a simpler technology with a higher bandwidth and is less expensive to deliver,’ said Ray O’Connor, 3Com country manager. ‘The addition of switching in the new infrastructure means that data traffic can be effectively filtered and transmitted on a one-to-many basis without the network being flooded.’
25/07/2003
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