Grass Roots Group Turns to Brocade

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced that Grass Roots Group, provider of performance improvement services, has installed its high-performance switch technology to upgrade existing networking infrastructure company-wide. This is to underpin various strategic IT initiatives to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, better serve clients and support a rapidly growing entrepreneurial business.

Grass Roots Group is making a multi-million pound investment to implement Internet Telephony, shift to a VPLS1-based wide area network service, upgrade storage, servers and network technology, and rationalise numerous disparate client delivery platforms onto one consolidated portal-based solution called Helix 3.

To facilitate this, and after a full evaluation of vendors, Grass Roots Group has implemented Brocade FastIron Edge X (FESX) series switches in its UK and USA data centres, along with Brocade FastIron Edge series Power over Ethernet (PoE) switches throughout its global offices. The equipment was supplied by Brocade partner, Calyx Group, with the roll out completed in October 2009.

With 2,100 clients, including 53 of the FTSE 100 and 134 of the FT Global 500, Grass Roots Group specialises in providing marketing, research and HR services to customers such as BMW, BT, Ford, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Lexus, 02 and Research in Motion (RIM). Working with clients’ staff, channel partners and customers, Grass Roots Group delivers a range of communication, education, measurement, reward and event management services. With presence in 16 countries worldwide, the business has grown exponentially in the past five years with turnover increasing 165 percent in this time to over £284 million for the year ending June 2008, with gross profit up 233 percent to £66.7 million.

Danny Attias, Grass Roots Group’s group head of technology, infrastructure & support, says: “While our existing LAN equipment was fit for purpose it was starting to become a constraint so it was time to upgrade. This supports where we are heading given our international growth and future direction with IT. Brocade’s switches were competitively priced, had a range of powerful features and transitioning was easy for our network staff given the use of a standard command line interface.”

Various drivers triggered changing the switched network. First, the business required PoE switches in its offices to implement a new Avaya Voice over IP (VoIP) system, which will be installed worldwide over time, and replaces multiple ageing Private Branch Exchanges (PBXs). Grass Roots Group has purchased 500 VoIP handsets for its offices, along with soft phones, while also upgrading to Internet Telephony in its five 24/7 contact centres – three of which are in the UK, with one in Mexico and Mumbai respectively.

Secondly, Grass Roots Group is refreshing its wide area network (WAN) approach in the UK by moving away from traditional MPLS2 technology to a VPLS network based on a solution from Exponential-e to connect all its sites. Peter Mulhooly, account director, Calyx Group, the Exponential-e reseller involved in the project, stated: “Exponential-e connects company LANs regionally, nationally and internationally into a single LAN-like WAN which is private and global. Bandwidth is vastly improved compared to MPLS with Grass Roots benefitting from an increase in speed from 4 Mbps to 100 Mbps between data centres and its office sites for the same money.”

In order to take advantage of this VPLS service, Grass Roots Group needed to use Layer 3 switches hence the requirement to upgrade. Attias added: “There are no routers in this new environment so Brocade’s FESX switches were ideal to give us control over our site interconnectivity.”

Grass Roots Group has two data centres in the UK – locations in the London Docklands and at Heathrow – with a pair of FESX switches deployed at each for resilience providing 1 Gbps server connectivity. This is a ten-fold increase in performance compared to its previous switches.

A third reason for the network upgrade is that Grass Roots Group is deploying a new technology framework called Helix 3 – utilising Liferay’s portal technology – which allows integrated incentive recognition and loyalty applications to be created quickly and efficiently for Grass Root Group’s customers without time consuming/bespoke development work being required. Upgrading back-end infrastructure was required as part of this project with new flexible storage systems, virtualized servers and, of course, faster networking introduced.

Paul Brown, Grass Roots Group’s UK chief technology officer, said: “Historically, lots of disparate systems were created using various technologies to meet client requirements, which were tough to integrate and resulted in effort often being duplicated. Helix 3 means we can tailor the functionality and front-end look and feel of solutions using Liferay’s portlet approach with one database sitting behind everything. This means we can respond to clients needs quicker while offering more value from the solutions we create for them.”

Brocade was also selected compared to obvious competitors because sFlow – a statistical sampling technology for network traffic monitoring – is provided on every switch port which makes network more secure and easier to manage. Attias concluded: “You can’t manage what you can’t see and sFlow allows the tracking and tracing of what is happening across the whole of our network – even when using a VPLS service – without impacting performance. It was key to us ultimately choosing Brocade.”

Ulrich Plechschmidt, vice president, EMEA at Brocade, stated: “Technology is fundamental to Grass Roots Group’s ability to service customers and the success of this project is evidenced by the fact that the whole infrastructure upgrade was implemented with minimal disruption to its business as usual activities. Moving forward Grass Roots Group has a feature rich, robust switch platform which can easily scale as commercial needs demand.”