All major functions such as water distribution, project design, pipeline network control, payment collection, planning and statistics computation, salaries and financing are computerized. The water quality inspection centre is seeking to attain international standards and has been nominated a member of the national water quality monitoring network.
Although its core business is water supply, the company has also diversified into various industries, including engineering and design,construction, sale of goods and materials, transportation of water supply equipment, vehicle repairs, production and sale of purified water, vehicle leasing, chemical manufacturing, hotel management, agriculture and livestock.
The Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company has installed a network solution from ProCurve Networking to cope with the demands of its new customer billing system.
When Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company converted to the new billing system, which bills individual customers according to their water usage, it saw an exponential increase in the number of customer accounts and data transactions.
The old network did not have enough capacity to cope with 600,000 users per month, nor the power to handle up to 6,000 simultaneous transactions every minute during peak periods.
A new network based on ProCurve Networking's Adaptive Edge Architecture™ provides a high-speed and secure communications platform to support the new billing system. It speeds up the bill collection process, reduces operating expenses, and provides a flexible foundation for the company to introduce new, convenient payment services.
With an influx of mobile workers in recent years, the population of the city of Shijiazhuang in Hebei province has been growing rapidly and water consumption continues to rise every year.
To control water consumption and minimize wastage, the Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company needs accurate data on water usage. In the past, analysis of data was a problem because the billing system was collective, based on meter readings for all houses on a street, instead of individual meters installed in each household.
To address this problem, the company developed a new billing system so that bills are based on meter readings for every household, but although this provided more accurate data, the billing system soon got overloaded. Network resources could not cope with the increase in network traffic and some data even got lost. A network upgrade became top priority.
The new billing system has to cope with 600,000 users per month, with every terminal serving an average of 1,000 users. During peak periods, at the beginning and end of each month, 50 per cent of the terminals have to process transactions simultaneously. This means the company needs 600 operating windows, with 300 opened concurrently during peak periods. Based on a response time per transaction of less than three seconds, this adds up to 6,000 simultaneous transactions every minute — more than the previous network resources could handle.
The Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company urgently needed to set up a new network infrastructure with sufficient capacity to cope with the large amount of network traffic.
The billing system of Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company comprises a database server and a high-speed network for transactional processing.
The core networking equipment, including the server, routers and switches, are installed in the information centre in the company headquarters. Peripheral devices in various branch offices in the city are connected to the information centre via a 2-Mbit Ethernet connection. The bill collection systems at the branch offices are also digitally connected to the bank for automated payment collection.
With this setup, Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company was able to create a wide area network with both redundancy and security features. To ensure continuous network availability, the network was designed with redundant links, and the connection to the bank was also equipped with powerful security features. At the request of Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company, a ProCurve 7203dl secure router was additionally installed as a backup resource. This worked well with existing Cisco and Huawei routers in the branch offices.
The network design took into consideration that there will be five branch offices in the future. The company also did projections to anticipate an increase in demand for network capacity over the next 3-5 years, based on the current rate of business growth, to ensure its network is scalable for future requirements.
After setting down the principles for network configuration and evaluating a number of competitive solutions, Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company chose to work with ProCurve Networking to build a high-speed and secure network based on ProCurve's Adaptive EDGE Architecture™.
The Adaptive EDGE Architecture (AEA) is based on two key principles: To maintain complete command of the network at the centre, and bring control and intelligence to the network edge where users connect.
This network design strategy makes it possible to shift the network infrastructure from being network-centric to user-centric.
The core equipment consists of two ProCurve Switch 9308 routing switches. These switches can be easily upgraded to 10-Gbit and feature redundant connections with the access switches via 1,000-MB circuits using VRRP and Spanning-Tree Protocol. Both ProCurve Switch 9308s are inter-connected via two 1,000-Mbit circuits.
ProCurve Switch 2626 and 2650 aggregation switches are linked to the core switches via a 1,000-Mbit redundancy circuit, and to the desktop platforms via a 100-Mbit circuit.
All the routers, including the 802.1X access authentication router, can support intelligent edge control. The information centre and branch offices are also connected via the secure ProCurve Switch 7203dl router, and can access the switches via a 100M Ethernet connection.
Another key component of the new network is ProCurve Manager Plus, a comprehensive Windows-based network management solution which enables the network manager to discover, configure and supervise ProCurve equipment and troubleshoot in the event of a failure. ProCurve Manager Plus also provides centralized configuration management, VLAN management, in-depth traffic analysis, group and policy management, as well as automatic software updates.
Using the ProCurve Networking solution, Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company is able to centralize the functions of network management and client access control relying on the ProCurve Manager Plus, and implement edge control with intelligent edge devices that support 802/1X authentication, MAC-address-based authentication or Web-based authentication.
The ProCurve Networking solution has addressed three key areas of concern for Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company to ensure the smooth implementation of its billing system. It has provided.
The company's new billing system is now supported by a powerful network infrastructure which also provides a robust and flexible foundation for future business development.
According to Chu Shan Jun, Engineer of Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company, the ProCurve solution provides a secure and intelligent high-speed network which not only meets the demands of the new billing system but also enables the company to operate multiple payment (bill) collection modes simultaneously, including on-site management, zone branching, direct debit by banks, sales office collection and prepayment. This gives its customers greater convenience, speeds up bill collection for the company, and at the same time reduces company expenses.
The company is impressed with the superior price-performance of ProCurve switches and after-sales service. "We are confident we will gain the returns on investment quickly. We now have a reliable communications platform to meet future business requirements and provide better services for users, including multimedia services," said Mr Chu.
The ProCurve Networking business unit of HP is a supplier of enterprise networking solutions comprising wired and wireless networking products, services and solutions—including WAN routers, Ethernet switches, routing switches, wireless access points and network management applications—which allow customers to build networks based on open standards that meet current and future needs for security, performance and reliability.
The ProCurve Networking Adaptive EDGE Architecture is a unique design strategy that creates a secure, mobile, multi-service network by placing intelligence at the edge-where users connect and policies are enforced. This innovative approach creates a dynamic network infrastructure designed to keep up with advancing technology and user needs while protecting business investments.
* The ProCurve Routing Switch 9300m series and Secure Access 700wl series have a one-year warranty with extensions available.
When you are ready to explore the benefits a ProCurve Networking solution can offer you, call HP at 1-800-975-7682.
To learn more about ProCurve Networking's Adaptive EDGE Architecture™ solutions, visit our home page.
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Chu Shan Jun
Engineer
Shijiazhuang Water Supply Company
