"We also wanted to be able to shape and prioritise the traffic in line with demand and took the view that while our old network was functional, it was not as sophisticated as it could be. By moving to a fully switched network we could look to the future and implement these new developments."

The Council considered a Cisco solution which was rejected on price and it was then close to agreeing a new deal with 3Com when ProCurve came to its attention.

"Although we are a full HP hardware site, we had had no real dealings with the ProCurve side of things but when we looked into it and noticed it included lifetime warranties, it was just too good to ignore," added Jones. "We were shown demonstrations and loaned equipment which immediately made everything run a lot quicker. The price then came back cheaper than 3Com which was even better because we were getting more for our money with ProCurve, and it was the solution that we liked best."

Four companies were suggested to provide design and installation services for the new network and the Council selected Newbury-based ADA Networks, not only because of its network expertise and ability to meet the budget, but also because of the reassurance that it was technically able to provide ongoing support.

ADA not only produced and implemented the new solution but also provided bespoke training for Chester City Council technical staff, fielding a specialist HP trainer for a joint course with neighbouring authority Vale Royal Borough Council. Staff from Chester also travelled to the ProCurve training centre in France.

At The Forum, Chester City Council has installed four ProCurve 5300xl series modular switches which deliver fast Layer 2,3 and 4 switching for the price of competitors' Layer 2 switches. They provide an infrastructure that will enable the Council to deploy voice, video and mission-critical data in the future.

Out to the edge of its new network and for areas that will have no future requirements for advanced Layer 3 services, the Council uses over 26 ProCurve 2650 Layer 2 switches with Spanning tree technologies for increased resilience.

"Working with ADA, we have designed resilience into the network so there is no single point of failure. If something goes wrong, the ProCurve switches will intelligently re-route traffic. That is a great improvement on our previous network where every point was a potential point of failure," added Jones. "The ProCurve 5300s have gigabit cards and we have the servers running across those different cards so there is also failover with built-in core redundancy."

Future plans will include introducing VoIP to reduce the cost of having both data and telephone links to remote buildings; the introduction of VLANS and port security which will potentially enable the Council to allow public access to certain parts of the network and in the longer term, investigating wireless connectivity.

However, ProCurve is already improving the efficiency of Council staff and, in turn, enabling them to improve the service they provide for the residents of Chester.

"Installing the new network means that throughput to the desktops is increasing from 10Mb to 100 Mb so the slowness that users previously experienced has gone," said Jones. "It's a knock on effect. The more reliable, the quicker and the more efficient we can make our IT services to our customers who are the City Council employees, then the better they can serve the public."

When you are ready to explore the benefits a ProCurve Networking solution can offer you, call HP at 1-800-975-7682.

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