* Case study: Airbus North America
Airbus North America, looking to bolster its disaster-recovery capabilities, has installed a new WAN that lets it consolidate separate voice lines and provides virtually unlimited bandwidth for future services.
Two recent events in particular posed potential threats to the Ashburn, Va., hub of its network that prompted the company to focus on business continuity. First a tornado narrowly missed the Ashburn facility and then a mowing crew cut a fiber line that had been left exposed along Virginia’s Route 28 during construction, says Charlie Fletcher, vice president of information services for Airbus.
Now if one of the Virginia sites goes down, the other four U.S. sites will still be able to connect with each other as well as the company’s affiliates in Europe. “We’re relatively comfortable that the same disaster would not take out both of those offices,” Fletcher says.
Rather than issuing an RFP for the upgrade, the company opted to let its WAN provider, Global Internetworking, Inc. (GII), design, install and manage a new core network that relies on Ethernet over SONET to support redundant logistics centers as well as redundant e-mail servers. The core of the new network has been running for about two weeks and will undergo refinements over the next six months that will bring further redundancy to key resources.
Until this month the company’s Ashburn site, where its logistics and e-mail center is located, served as the hub of a hub-and-spoke network serving 600 to 700 workers. It connected via point-to-point circuits to engineering facilities in Wichita, Kan., a flight-simulator site in Miami, headquarters in Herndon, Va., and a government-liaison/lobbying office in Washington, D.C. The hub was also the gateway to a DS-3 ATM link to France. All network communication among the offices was routed through Ashburn.
For the full story, please go to:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/062705-airbus-sonet.html
