Science & Technology
Science and Technology
Science and Technology
Mon, October 18, 2010
French Ministry of National Education Gives Brocade ServerIron Application Delivery Switches Top Marks
PARIS--([ BUSINESS WIRE ])--Brocade® (NASDAQ:BRCD) today announced that the French Ministry of National Education has enhanced the reliability of its network by deploying Brocade ServerIron® switches to deliver a load-balancing solution to improve network performance, SSL capabilities and application availability.
"We were particularly impressed with the technical expertise displayed by the teams at Brocade. Their fast response and dedication truly added value. Thanks to Brocade, all local authorities can now leverage the high-availability system. Furthermore, it did not take long to see a rise in performance"
The Brocade ServerIron family of application delivery switches maximizes application uptime, security and performance by leveraging highly advanced traffic management and security features, and has enabled the Ministry to provide reliable services to its 30 local education authorities.
The Ministry of National Education is a highly distributed organization, made up of 30 local education authorities scattered throughout France (mainland France and its overseas territories), and this structure places huge pressure on the network. Applications developed and managed by the Ministrya™s administrative department a" such as mainstream solutions for posting Baccalaur©at exam results and business solutions for HR and curriculum management a" are hosted within each local education authoritya™s data center. This approach requires high levels of performance and availability, especially at seasonal peaks such as when publishing exam results. Unfortunately, the Ministrya™s network was starting to shows signs of strain.
Recognizing this, in 2007 the Ministry of National Education invited tenders for the cost-effective renewal of its legacy hardware. The tender demanded the following: fault detection or scheduled maintenance for the server clusters; SSL hardware accelerators to increase the performance of encrypted data exchanges; load balancing to ensure high application availability.
An expert panel of network engineers (coordinated by C©dric Foll, the Ministrya™s Education ISO) was in charge of overseeing the tender process and selecting the most appropriate supplier. The process was specifically aimed at systems integrators, where the winning firm would be responsible for designing and installing the hardware and providing training and support. After six weeks of careful deliberation, the only vendor able to offer a solution that met all the Ministrya™s criteria was Brocade.
aWhen making our decision, the expert panel focused on the technical specifications and the price. We selected Brocade and the Brocade ServerIron application delivery switches, as the solution proposed was very thorough and covered all the technical prerequisites listed in our specifications. Only Brocade offered an attractive TCO proposition and this, mapped to the technical facets displayed, made our choice obvious,a explains C©dric Foll, Education ISO at the Ministry of National Education.
The primary challenge for Brocade was to develop a network to support both the business applications used by the Ministrya™s employees, and the classroom and distance learning applications used by the students. These applications required an in-depth analysis of the data exchanges at Layers 4 through 7 of the OSI model in order to identify and maintain the integrity of the sessions on the servers receiving the queries. In addition, conventional applications, such as cache server load sharing, were implemented to monitor and protect Web browsing data.
After conducting a pilot study at a test site, the Ministry of National Education put the system into full production. Nancy-Metz was the first local authority to implement Brocade products, delivered through local systems integrator, Bull, and served as a benchmark for the other authorities. Over a two-week period, network engineers from the Ministry deployed the Brocade hardware, with assistance from Bull technicians.
aWe were particularly impressed with the technical expertise displayed by the teams at Brocade. Their fast response and dedication truly added value. Thanks to Brocade, all local authorities can now leverage the high-availability system. Furthermore, it did not take long to see a rise in performance," concludes C©dric Foll.
Following this pilot, the Ministry of National Education added Brocade ServerIron application delivery switches to its catalogue of approved products. Local education authorities may purchase the hardware through standard processes with the goal of deploying two switches (in active/passive or active/active mode) at each site. To date, 25 local education authorities have deployed 50 devices. Preliminary training sessions for the network engineers have been lined up and will be given by the teams at Bull and Brocade, with further support provided by Brocade.
About Brocade
Brocade (NASDAQ:BRCD) develops extraordinary networking solutions that enable today's complex, data-intensive businesses to optimise information connectivity and maximise the business value of their data. For more information, visit [ www.brocade.com ].
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