Case Study

Shore To Shore relies on Cat6

Chennai-based Shore To Shore India opted for a Cat6 cabling solution to avoid network congestion, says Gaurav Patra

Network uptime and bandwidth were crucial for operations. That is why STS was looking for a reliable cabling solution, says P Kannan

Since 1991, Shore To Shore (STS) India has been offering a full line of merchandise identification products and a growing base of information technology capabilities and services. STS focuses on developing brand identification solutions to reduce customers’ sourcing expenses by combining the economics of local sourcing with the consistency of single source production. The company has three sales offices at Mumbai, Bangalore and Tirupur, and two production locations at Chennai and New Delhi.

All the offices and production locations are connected through a 512 Kbps leased line (LL) wide area network. Altogether, the company has around 95 PCs and servers (number of nodes) across the country. Apart from this, the production centres at Chennai and New Delhi are also connected through a VPN tunnel. The Chennai centre is also connected with other centres in the UK, US and Sri Lanka through a VPN.

The need

STS utilises a growing base of information technology capabilities and services. In the industry that it operates in, one day quicker to market can greatly affect the performance of the company’s bottom line. Understanding this, STS has invested in two e-commerce systems. Each of these facilities provides a means to speed up design development and the customer’s order. To have a successful e-commerce system, network uptime is crucial. When the company was expanding its operation to new premises with a node base of 140 points, it examined new technologies that could save time and money. STS was also looking for an effective, reliable and futuristic cabling solution. “Network uptime and bandwidth were crucial for our operations. That is why we were looking for a reliable cabling solution,” says P Kannan, the company’s MIS manager.

After a comprehensive evaluation process, STS finally decided to deploy Cat6 cabling. Prior to this the company was using Cat5 cabling solutions. “Basically, because of the capabilities of Cat6 to support maximum bandwidth utility and 100 percent performance, we opted for the Cat6 cabling solution from D-Link,” says Kannan, also revealing that almost all the big vendors were in the race. Again, as the company was expanding its network, it was looking for a single brand/vendor to achieve better total cost of ownership (TCO). “Compared to other products we were well-versed with D-Link products. The vendor also offered us a very competitive price as opposed to the other players,” he says. Apart from this, the after-sales support capability of D-Link went in its favour. Today, the company is using advanced switched model Cat6 cabling solutions from D-Link, for which the vendor has given them a three-year replacement warranty on the solution that STS is using. “In addition to the service guarantee, D-Link has also assured us replacement in case of any problem,” says Kannan. Chennai-based system integrator, Solaris Computers, implemented the Cat6 cabling solution at STS. The implemented solution is based on L-2 Managed Switching Technology at the access and distribution layer. STS has gone for an active as well as passive solution.

Benefits

Before implementing the Cat6 solution bandwidth was a major issue at STS. “To avoid traffic congestion on our network, we decided to go in for Cat6 cabling. The 100 Kbps bandwidth in Cat6 now allows us to have an absolutely congestion-free network. This is one of the biggest benefits that we have got after deploying Cat6,” says Kannan. Apart from this, the reliability and performance characteristic of the Cat6 solution has also matched the expectations of STS. The passive solution, which they are using on the Cat6 cable, has the scalability of Gigabit speeds.

Applications like a firewall (from Sonic Wall), website and e-mail server are running on this Cat6 cable. Kannan says that the high bandwidth backbone capability of Cat6 to handle future nodes is one factor that went in favour of this solution.

Presently, STS is using the Cat6 solution only at the Chennai location. But the company is thinking of migrating other locations to Cat6.

gaurav@expresscomputeronline.com