Nisa Today’s (Holdings) Limited, Scunthorpe - 2006 High Performance LAN infrastructure with integrated VoIP Transport

The Challenge: During 2006, Nisa Today’s embarked on Project Vision, a new 625,000 square foot Distribution Centre with an overall budget of £30 million. Key to the success of the project was the delivery of a new Local Area Network (LAN) infrastructure to support both wired and wireless clients. The network needed to be fully tolerant as any outages would stop the Distribution Centre from being able to operate. Nisa Today’s engaged Nettitude, who had been providing networking consultancy and implementation services to them for a number of years, to design and implement the new solution. As well as the new LAN, Nisa Today’s also required Nettitude to design a fully integrated solution that would interconnect a legacy telephone system that was installed into Project Vision, with a similar system installed in one of their other offices on the same business park.

The Solution: Nettitude designed a new LAN infrastructure based on Cisco Catalyst 3750 and 3560 switches. Utilising the extensive fibre layout within the new building, the network was designed with redundant connections between all cabinets, allowing the network to automatically and seamlessly reroute traffic in the event of failure. All of the new switches installed support Power over Ethernet (PoE) allowing Nisa Today’s to easily support wireless Access Points mounted in the warehouse ceiling without having to run power to them. The network infrastructure consists of more than 30 Cisco switches, spread across 16 cabinets. Extensive use of Virtual LANs (VLANs) was made within the design, allowing the network to be segmented into business functions with access controls being established to increase the level of security embedded in the network. The VLANs were extended to other Nisa Today’s buildings on the same business park campus. This allowed Nisa Today’s to “virtualize” their Intel Server infrastructure using VMWare, in order to support the business’ Disaster Recovery requirements. Server instances can be activated in another of Nisa Today’s buildings in a matter of seconds and by utilizing the intelligent VLAN architecture can retain their existing configuration settings allowing users to connect to them automatically regardless of location. In order to support the telephone system interconnection, Nettitude used a pair of Cisco 2800 Integrated Services Routers (ISRs), one installed at each location. Each Cisco router connected to the local telephone system at each site, and then created a “virtual trunk” between them by using IP as the transport across optical fibre. Quality of Service (QoS) was enabled on both the routers and LAN switches at each site ensuring that the voice was treated with priority.

The Benefits: Nettitude designed, implemented and now manage the entire LAN infrastructure on the Project Vision campus. The network was designed to support Nisa Today’s business requirements of high performance, high functionality and high availability and delivers on each of these criteria. By integrating voice transport across the infrastructure, Nisa Today’s also benefit from free site to site telephony, reducing their operating expenses. Background: Nisa-Today's is the UK's largest buying group for independent retail and wholesale companies. Its commercial objective is to negotiate the lowest cost price of products and provide the most efficient supply chain for its member companies, by strategically using their combined turnover powerbase. The 'Nisa' organisation was formed in 1977 as the 'Northern Independent Supermarkets Association' within the retail industry. There are now in excess of 950 members operating over 6,000 stores making up the Nisa retail business. The group is also experiencing great success with the recent rollout of its two branded fascias - 'Nisa' for retailers and 'Today's' for the retail stores of wholesalers. This allows participating retailers to benefit from a nationally recognized image, store layout and merchandising formats providing consumers with a consistently high standard of products, range and service.