The Agricultural Research Council (ARC) has awarded an R8.5 million contract to Saab Grintek to upgrade its data and communication network and interconnect its 28 sites around the country.
Sites vary in size from as little as eight users to as many as 400 users. In its entirety, the contract calls for 3 000 cabled points served from 13 server rooms.
The Saab Grintek-ARC association began a few years ago, when the company supplied Nortel equipment for self-implementation, with some assistance from Saab Grintek engineering staff.
"One of the elements that the ARC identified in this latest contract was the way in which it communicated," says Makhup Nyama, Group CEO of Saab Grintek. "Many of its research projects require sharing large volumes of data, the ability to teleconference and communicate with researchers at any of its 28 sites around the country."
"To achieve our vision to be a nationally and internationally recognised Centre of Excellence in agricultural science and innovation, we need to be able to communicate and move data between the various sites fast and efficiently," says Dr Nthoana Tau-Mzamane, CEO of the ARC.
As IP telephony and other collaborative applications are driving more traffic to the edge of the network and as file sizes continue to grow, users need more bandwidth. The convergence of voice, video, data and storage enables users to do more from their desktops.
"While ARC's network has coped reasonably up to now, it needed to plan ahead and ensure that when adding VOIP telephony it retained data flow integrity," says Jim Whelan of Saab Grintek's Enterprise division.
"While VOIP is bandwidth-intensive, it offers large cost saving opportunities, as no voice calls between the various institutes will have to break out into the public network," says Whelan.
The various sites will be equipped with the technology to handle the bandwidth required for VOIP. Although at this stage VOIP telephony will only be installed at some of the major sites, all the others are ready to accommodate VOIP as the voice network expands.
"It is a challenging project requiring extensive cabling between the various buildings making up one remote site, which is then connected to the head office site in Hatfield," says Whelan.
"We have engaged Interconnect Systems, a company that specialises in site cabling, to take care of that aspect of the project, while we concentrate on the supply and installation of the switches and ancillary equipment," says Whelan.
Currently, ARC has disparate types of hardware at the various sites, and some of the interconnecting fibre cables have come to the end of their usable life and need upgrading.
Saab Grintek engineers worked closely with the ARC CIO and his staff to develop a network architecture that will be future proof for a minimum of three years. In addition, the network has to provide for central management of user access and provisioning of network policies.
The Saab Grintek solution is based on equipment from its cutting-edge technology partner Nortel. Nortel, as a major supplier of local area networks, has developed equipment that is keeping ahead of the way in which business today utilises LANs.
The contract also included the provision of lightning protection in areas where it is needed. Here, Saab Grintek worked with Clearline to achieve maximum protection.
The next phase of the project is to look at updating the firewall and intruder detection which is outside the current contract.
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