The Irish Nationwide Building Society has installed a high-speed Gigabit Ethernet network using switching technology from 3Com to connect 300 users at its headquarters in Dublin.
3Com and Dublin-based channel partners, InterFusion Networks and Qualcom Systems, won the contract to upgrade the network at the building society's headquarters following a tendered bid involving other major networking providers.
Derek Dunne, IT manager, Irish Nationwide Building Society says: "We had difficulties with our network and wanted not so much to increase the speed of the network but to minimise network crashes and increase resilience. The network upgrade has worked very well as there has been an increase in reliability and now a significant reduction of downtime on the network. We used to have a flat architecture and we needed to improve our network performance - our problems were purely technical."
The implementation is based on 3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4400 switches with a SuperStack 3 Switch 4950.
Eoghan Stedman, business development manager, Qualcom Systems, which supplied the hardware and maintained the network, adds: "The addition of switching in the new infrastructure means that data traffic can be effectively filtered and transmitted on a one-to-many basis without the network being flooded. The new system also offers the flexibility of adding new users without unnecessary disruption, as in the past."