Allied Telesyn

Today’s offices make ever-increasing use of online resources and applications. When the network is down, productivity falls. Network managers need to provide reliable, secure, fast networks that keep businesses running smoothly today and into the future. This dependence on network availability is moving IT managers to review their current facilities to decide whether there are sufficient capabilities to meet their needs and when to upgrade.

  Today’s offices make ever-increasing use of online resources and applications. When the network is down, productivity falls. Network managers need to provide reliable, secure, fast networks that keep businesses running smoothly today and into the future. This dependence on network availability is moving IT managers to review their current facilities to decide whether there are sufficient capabilities to meet their needs and when to upgrade.
Choosing the right solution can be difficult when there are so many different requirements that must be satisfied:

• Bandwidth
• Resilience
• Application support
• Management system
• Security
• Future proofing

  Allied Telesis have been delivering innovation in this area for some time. This document describes our Enterprise Network Solution, using Allied Telesis products to provide a modular, scalable, and flexible solution suitable for small to large enterprise businesses. The technologies featured in this solution include:
Switch stacking with link-aggregation for resilience.

• Layer 3 core switching.
• Network Access Control (NAC) for security.
• Quality of Service (QoS) for Voice over IP (VoIP) and video streaming.

  This document aims to help you build different bandwidth solutions with similar resilience, QoS, and security features, ensuring that all your current network needs are met with future expansion and new applications catered for.

  Application Support - networks are now becoming more than just a means for moving data from server to PC. Converged networks are now becoming the norm with VoIP becoming the telephony system of choice. Multimedia services are also being added and applications are shifting larger files with more graphical content. Network managers want to install equipment that can support PC applications and IP telephony. Power over Ethernet (PoE) options at the edge are available for all solutions.

Some may want to have dedicated PoE ports, some will want to be able to plug any device anywhere. In order to support all the necessary applications QoS is essential to ensure that voice and multimedia pass through the network without loss or delay. QoS also allows critical applications to be prioritized above Internet access and other background functions. Many standards-based VoIP systems now require LLDP-MED protocol for auto-configuration of IP handsets. Support for this is available on all PoE edge switches.
 

  Management - a resilient network is only as good as the management system that informs you that a failure has occurred and the network has healed itself. The network manager is then able to action the repair before the failure can
affect the network availability. The network management system performs the following tasks:

• Mapping and monitoring of network devices.
• Monitoring of all resilient functions - PSU, Links, stacks etc.
• Alerting of important failures by e-mail, paging etc.
• Collection of statistics to allow reporting on key devices and links.

  Security - as the dependence on the network and PCs grow, so do the risks of attack, either malicious or from viruses being unknowingly brought in.