Design & Implementation of a £1.5M Cisco Data Center

ProNet Expert have just won a £1.5M Data Center Design and Implementation project for a UK based firm in the financial sector. The customer explained there were two key factors that separated ProNet Expert from the competition - their highly competitive pricing and the unparalleled number of Cisco CCIE Consultants that they were able to supply.

The new core network was designed around a Catalyst 6509 infrastructure. Our Cisco Consultants held initial talks with the customers IT team in order to create a design with high availability and scalability in mind. The IP addressing Design was created from the scratch, as were the physical and logical (Layer 2 and Layer 3) Visio Designs.

The customer’s aim was to build a very centralized and consolidated infrastructure, and that’s why the ProNet Expert Design was built around the modular blade module options within the Catalyst 6500 series. The Core was designed to connect dozens of other internal departments and external stock market connects. Cisco Firewall Service Modules (FWSM) along with Intrusion Detection Modules (IDSM-2) were chosen in order to deliver the highest, granular security. Additionally, numerous Application Control Engine (ACE) blades were deployed to enhance performance for the server farms.

For Network Management Purposes, redundant Cisco Access Control Servers (ACS) were deployed to govern access to the core network. Additionally Cisco Security Manager was deployed to ensure ease of Security management. As a generic Network Monitoring Solution, CiscoWorks has been set up and Cisco NAM blades were deployed to allow for analysis and historical archiving of data streams.

ProNet Expert delivered a turn-key solution to the customer, from the Design and Documentation, to staging, testing, roll-out and handover. Pronet Expert delivered this exciting projects within 9 months.

For competitive reasons we are not mentioning the customer name in this article, but to those interested in our Services we are of course happy to obtain oral or written references.