WaveCrest Deploys 10GbE Brocade Network

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced that WaveCrest, a telecommunications company offering wholesale and hosted retail telephony services, is improving performance and reducing data center sprawl with a Brocade Extraordinary Network.

The new network infrastructure features Brocade BigIron RX-16 and Brocade FastIron SX 800 series 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) backbone switches at its London-based headquarters and data centre facility. This is a part of a £2.8 million total infrastructure upgrade (£1.1 million in new back office IT infrastructure and £1.7 million in WaveCrest’s core VoIP solution) that will update back office systems and transition WaveCrest’s telecommunications network to delivering services entirely via voice over IP (VoIP).

  With revenues last year totaling £130 million, WaveCrest is one of Europe’s largest privately owned wholesale carrier businesses, selling more than 300 million minutes per month. It specializes in voice traffic termination, working with over 200 customers including fixed-line operators, long-distance telephone operators and other voice wholesalers.

Tim French, WaveCrest’s VP of Network and IT systems, explained: “As a telecommunications wholesaler we have very large amounts of data, complex systems and a heavy reliance on technology.”

The new 10 GbE Brocade-based network will support back office upgrades featuring HP blade servers, Dell EqualLogic SAN arrays and virtualisation software from VMWare. For the new IP platform, WaveCrest deployed a solution comprising Genband session border controllers (1- and Dialogic integrated media gateways (2). Both these infrastructure projects are underpinned by the implementation of a new 10 GbE network based on Brocade switches.

Configured as a ring with 10 GbE links between the two sites, the Brocade switches will ultimately replace the company’s legacy, and expensive to manage, circuit-switched network and allow WaveCrest to use MRJ21 high density connectors, which significantly simplifies cabling by consolidating six copper gigabit ports onto a single cable.

French added: “For us, it’s been an enormous leap forward. We’ve taken best of breed technology, and built something which completely replaces the infrastructure we had before, all in one go. Our shortlist included three vendors. Brocade impressed and was ultimately chosen as its switches offered the right features and had a track record of success with a good installed base, particularly in data centres.”

WaveCrest further improved operations in its server environment with HP’s c-Class blade servers running VMWare’s virtualization software which attach to the Brocade switches using HP Virtual Connect (3). This has reduced its servers from 80 physical machines to 14 blade servers in two enclosures – from 20 racks to just four – a decrease of 80 percent in datacenter capacity.

The IT infrastructure upgrades have lead to a huge improvement in reliability and performance of all systems, and in some cases, a six-fold increase in performance has been realised. As part of the network update, the new infrastructure is cheaper and easier to manage which has enabled WaveCrest to bring up new customer connections in hours rather than weeks.

Ulrich Plechschmidt, Vice President, EMEA, at Brocade, concluded: “The WaveCrest project demonstrates how an elegant network architecture [which simplifies the infrastructure] helps make maximum use of systems irrespective of whether they’re storage, voice or server related and reduces the number of people required to manage it. This is crucial as there’s ever more focus on the bottom line in these cost-conscious times.”

Notes:
(1) Session border controllers provide the interface between WaveCrest’s customers and thirty party carriers
(2) This converts legacy TDM signals to IP
(3) HP Virtual Connect dramatically simplifies Ethernet cabling and allows administrators to add or replace servers without having to reconfigure cabling