PROJECT PORTFOLIO

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, an IT service provider, required assistance with data center design for their web-hosting services. Our Customer needed help to create an effective and agile data center.

Luetschine’s solution

Luetschine brought over 15 years of data center design experience with us to this project. We created a design that supported our Customer’s competitive future in the market and applied the right fabric technologies for the future.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

The art and science of data center design evolves quickly. We leveraged our experience and in-depth technical knowledge of data center design to meet our Customer’s requirements and safeguard their competitive place in the market.

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, an insurance company, sought to spin-off their APAC subsidiary but needed the new entity’s network and data centers to coexist with their network until the separation.

Luetschine’s solution

Luetschine devised a WAN design to interconnect the new Hong Kong entity’s locations within the APAC region and planned a method to seamlessly complete the spin-off from the Customer.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

The spin-off completed on time with no unplanned outage or impact to either business entity. Our design provided a smooth transition and enhanced application performance over the new network with an included WAN optimization solution.

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, an energy company, was engaged in an expansion project to take their services into China. During the multi-year construction period of the expansion project they experienced slow application response time between their construction field offices making access to the needed applications impossible.

Luetschine’s solution

Luetschine analyzed our Customer’s existing infrastructure and conducted audits of the network before recommending improvements that created a secure, stable and productive Chinese connection to their US-based client server applications. We then redesigned the network from top to bottom to meet our customer’s unique requirements.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

Upon completion, our Customer no longer experienced application and response time issues, increasing overall productivity. Our Customer could work productively from China while keeping key applications running in the US. In addition our Customer could keep key applications running in the US, resulting in simplified security and regulatory compliance, and also resulting in cost savings as duplicate data center environments were not needed.

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, a large industrial conglomerate, experienced a series of Internet outages. The Customer’s infrastructure was believed to be redundant, and, therefore, the Internet outages should not have been possible. They needed Luetschine to determine the root cause of the outages and to prevent future interruptions.

Luetschine’s solution

Luetschine built a lead-strategy team of subject-matter experts and established a communication plan that included a daily status report to the Customer’s senior leadership team. We worked to identify the root cause of the outages and to make recommendations to fix the issues. As a result of our review, we prepared a detailed audit report with a categorized and prioritized list of recommendations.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

The Customer implemented our recommendations and the Internet egress facility has performed flawlessly ever since, resulting in no business-impacting Internet outages.

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, an IT service provider that supplies infrastructure monitoring, needed changes to their infrastructure monitoring service. The Customer monitored the infrastructure via three global network operation centers (NOCs). Our Customer’s network address translation (NAT) was not feasible due to the large number of IP addresses presented to the NOCs from each of their customers.

Luetschine’s solution

Luetschine reviewed our Customer’s architecture and determined that a multi-tenancy carrier-grade MPLS network with a virtualized routing instance dedicated to individual customers was required. The solution preserved and isolated each individual customer’s address space within our Customer’s overall network management solution.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

Luetschine’s solution combined carrier-grade MPLS and operational support with automatic recovery from single-point failures and provided optimal path selection between each NOC and each individual customer at any time. The solution added scalability, resiliency, and performance consistency to our Customer’s network management solution, preparing them for future growth and competitive advantage.

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, an insurance company, required consolidation of their global Internet egress points to reduce cost and improve security.

Luetschine’s solution

Luetschine’s network solution consolidated dozens of Internet egress points down to six.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

Consolidating the Internet egress points created economies of scale for purchasing and optimizing bandwidth by having fewer egress points and eliminating under-utilized Internet feeds. Plus, the consolidation generated significant cost savings.

Leveraging Modern Technology to Upgrade a College Campus Network

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, a university in the United States, operated two campuses in close proximity. The Customer’s existing infrastructure consisted of obsolete ATM LANE for both voice and video, private dark fiber interconnecting the buildings on each campus, and leased T3 lines interconnecting the separate campuses. The Customer sought to modernize the campus network to improve performance and reduce costs.

Luetschine’s solution

Luetschine architected and implemented a new, simplified campus LAN based on 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet technology and replaced the T3 leased lines with optical metro-Ethernet service. We replaced the ATM CBR voice service with VoIP running over the metro-Ethernet service. Our microsegmentation design significantly reduced (10x) failover time and allowed prevention of potential network outages from rogue equipment.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

The Ethernet over metro-Ethernet architecture increased the network capacity by 300% while reducing our Customer’s network operating expenses by 65%. Our Customer gained improved performance and network availability while realizing a substantial cost savings.

Resilient Extranet Infrastructure for an Energy Company

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, a nuclear energy company, relied heavily on extranet connectivity to work with its business partners. Unique security requirements of this project added complexities into our final solution.

Luetschine’s solution

To meet the security requirements, Luetschine leveraged traditional firewalls backed by SSL VPN gateways for role-based access control (RBAC) and next-generation firewalls capable of RBAC and application-based access control. We backed these control measures with extensive monitoring, logging, and intrusion prevention capabilities. To add granularity to the controlling custom web applications, we leveraged server-side proxies to control access to specific web pages. We included secure routing featuring route-servers, which allowed dynamic routing while protecting from bogus routing information. We designed the network edge to be flexible enough to support a variety of access methods.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

The infrastructure supported a variety of partner extranet connections. Our Customer can now communicate more easily, more quickly, and in a secure manner to complete projects on schedule. Our Customer became a more agile business partner, increasing their competitive edge in the market.

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, a nuclear power plant, had an aging robot-assisted inspection network critical to their steam turbine scheduled maintenance windows. The network was designed in the 1980s and required an update to enhance scalability and interoperability with today’s IP technology.

Luetschine’s solution

Luetschine conducted a business analysis of our Customer’s use cases, operating procedures, cost elements, systems architecture, and requirements and identified the critical areas of concern: the network transport, the addressing scheme, and the large amount of nodes with incomplete network stacks. We architected a modern infrastructure based on our Customer’s requirements with special attention to scalability, security, and agility. Once the architecture was complete, we conducted a proof-of-concept and pilot before going live with the new network.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

Luetschine architected and implemented a modern network that dramatically enhanced our Customer’s business and revenue stream. Leveraging IP-based technology v. legacy 1980s technology resulted in cost savings of over 50% in the first year!

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer recognized the escalating security threats from within their own organization and engaged Luetschine to design a zone-based security architecture that relied on the defense-in-depth principle to more effectively secure corporate intellectual property from internal and external threats.

Luetschine’s solution

Luetschine determined that the Customer’s mobile global work force required role-based access control (RBAC) to effectively control access to applications and data. Moreover, the Customer’s global sourcing requirements meant that supplier or partner roles could be different on each project, necessitating granular control at the application and/or transaction level.

Luetschine developed a zone-based security architecture to group resources and clients by risk profile. We added context-base access control (CBAC) and application-aware next generation firewalls to protect the data centers. For the client access network, we added a comprehensive network access control solution that fingerprinted each client device and put it into the most appropriate security zone. Host-based firewalls and IPS software protected each client device from intrusion and prevented corporate-owned computers from hosting peer-to-peer services.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

Our Customer’s future was secure with best of breed technologies. Luetschine developed a tailor-made security solution that ensured our Customer’s intellectual property would be safe for years to come.

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, a global industrial conglomerate, engaged us to better understand WAN optimization technology, advise them on optimization strategy, create a design, and guide them through vendor selection.

Luetschine’s solution

Luetschine conducted educational sessions with our Customer’s technology council to help them understand WAN optimization technology. Following our educational sessions, our Customer decided to pursue WAN optimization for their network. We aided our Customer in every step of WAN optimization. We helped to formulate an overall strategy, create a project roadmap, fashion a network design, evaluate and select vendors, conduct a test pilot, and implement the solution.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

The WAN optimization technology consolidated servers and applications to reduce IT costs. The optimization technology improved application response time significantly. All centralized applications were now accessible to users at all network locations enabling a ubiquitous end-user experience.

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, a multinational insurance company, had a disparate 700 site network that needed migration to a single homogenous network with consistent features and service levels. Concurrently, our Customer required improved service consistency, service quality, and cost-effectiveness while observing industry regulations for security boundaries.

Luetschine’s solution

Luetschine partnered with our Customer to re-architect the network into a single global wide-area network. The formerly distributed Internet egress, remote access, security policies, and network service levels were consolidated into a single, manageable platform. The revised service levels allowed our Customer to eliminate regional point solution applications and replace them with corporate standard equivalents.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

The new network design reduced cost, improved productivity, and enhanced security policy compliance. The unified global wide-area network consolidated business applications into fewer data centers, resulted in reduced network technologies, required fewer vendors to support, and simplified network management. The consolidated Internet egress facilities replaced an ineffective point solution. Our Customer could now rely on a consistent and secure network at a reduced cost.

Our Customer’s requirements

Our Customer, a nuclear power company, had a medium sized global network that needed a technology refresh with improved optimization and performance. The Customer needed to meet unique site-specific regulatory requirements, and they maintained several difficult-to-reach locations.

Luetschine’s solution

We partnered with our Customer to architect the right solution to meet their needs. Our solution introduced flexibility to the network transport, compartmentalization of routing domains, routing configuration standards, and WAN optimization. We achieved site-specific network availability and satisfied regulatory requirements in our design.

Project outcomes and benefits for our Customer

Our network design removed business impacting outages at a mission-critical site. The network design provided resiliency and performance while satisfying the distinct regulatory landscape.

Below are a few examples of manufacturing engagements we have done in this dynamic, fast-paced business vertical.

Luetschine Consultants have…

… Designed and assisted with the implementation of a network for a nuclear fuel plant across three separate facilities, with one of the facilities designed to be fully isolated from the other two to meet necessary safety requirements.

… Designed and assisted with the implementation of WAN connectivity to offshore oil rigs by leveraging a combination of wireless carrier technologies such as laser, microwave, and satellite.

… Designed and assisted with the implementation of a LAN for a mine, which is by nature a physically dynamic and dangerous environment where network connectivity is expensive and challenging.

… Engaged with other manufacturing Customers, including several projects involving warehouse networks. Our typical warehouse engagements have included indoors and outdoors WiFi for bar code scanners. The dynamic RF environment in warehouses and wireless network security concerns are key challenges; we have the experience and expertise to assist our Customers with their unique requirements.