Northern & Shell Combines Forces with Foundry Networks to Prove Its Motto 'Nothing is Difficult for the Strong'


Northern & Shell Combines Forces With Foundry Networks ToProve Its Motto 'Nothing Is Difficult For The Strong'[1]

o Northern & Shell standardises on Foundry for complete HQ refit
o Project includes the purchase of Foundry FastIron 1500 and EdgeIron F48G switches for Northern & Shell's regional office and disaster recovery centre

July 17, 2007 - Foundry Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FDRY), a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announces that Northern & Shell (N&S), one of the UK's leading independent publishing companies has installed Foundry's core and edge switches at its sites in Glasgow and Preston to deliver a complete end-to-end LAN solution. This is in addition to Foundry being selected as the network supplier of choice at its HQ in London.

N&S is privately owned by Richard Desmond who founded the company in 1974 with a vision to become a significant force in British and worldwide media. This ambition has been realised through the development of a broad portfolio of magazines and broadcast interests, culminating in the acquisition of Express Newspapers from United News & Media in 2000. Today N&S publishes four national newspapers - The Daily & Sunday Express, The Daily & Sunday Star, as well as consumer magazines Now, Star and Ok! - the UK's most popular weekly celebrity title.[2]

With a turnover of over £463 million and profits totalling £77.5 million[3], N&S is continuing to expand its operations in both the UK and abroad, with foreign editions in ten countries, including the USA. N&S distributes on average two million newspapers a day and two million magazines a week, reaching in total 10 million readers across the UK and many more in 80 countries globally.

In September 2004, N&S moved its headquarters in London for 1,200 staff to a new site in Lower Thames Street, near Blackfriars, which involved a total refurbishment, including new data centre, cabling, network infrastructure, servers, furniture and air conditioning. Foundry was chosen because its edge switch technology offered gigabit Ethernet to the desktop capability, supported legacy systems based on 10/100, were VoIP ready and could be connected to Foundry core switches using fibre links. The technology is also easy to manage - industry standard CLIs[4] are used - and can be upgraded easily over time.

Following the success of this, N&S decided to extend the relationship and selected to install Foundry core and edge switches at its regional sites. This included a disaster recovery (DR) site in Broughton (near Preston) for 120 users and an office in Glasgow for 70 staff.

Steve Morris, N&S' IT network & security manager explains, "We run a 24 x 7 business and need to ensure our network is up and running at all times, with maximum throughput and performance. The DR site is mission-critical to our business, so we chose to install Foundry FastIron switches as they offer excellent resilience. Having experienced zero network downtime since installing Foundry switches in London, we knew that they would be the right solution for all our DR needs."

Foundry was the only vendor to meet N&S's technical network requirements -as well as providing a flexible solution that met with N&S's own network design. Two FastIron core switches have been implemented at each office for resilience, along with 12 FastIron workgroup switches with the project completed by Foundry reseller, Matrix Communications.

Morris adds, "The size of files that staff have to send and receive are getting larger all the time with magazines and newspapers increasingly reliant on visual imagery for content. With photograph resolutions of eight megpixels plus the norm today, huge demands are made on our network, hence the need for new equipment. Our business is also continually expanding - an office was recently opened in Australia for example - so our network has to be available throughout the night, making the requirement for switch reliability ever more critical."

N&S were particularly interested in Foundry's support for sFlow, a monitoring technology, which allows technical staff to improve network management as they can see how the network is performing right down to the byte level, without impacting on performance.

Morris concludes, "For me, a key success of the whole Foundry project is that we just don't worry about the network. The new switches went in, they work and no one notices or complains about the network any more. Everyone just gets on with their jobs."

Bob Schiff, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Business Unit, Foundry Networks said: "Global businesses, like N&S demand first-class network operations and the FastIron and EdgeIron switches are ideal for enterprises with growing traffic demands. For the users in Glasgow and Preston, the switches ensure highly reliable service crucial given that the transfer of news, stories and pictures is a 24/7 operation."

[1] N&S' motto is Forti Nihil Difficile
[2] According to the National Readership Survey 2006, OK!'s circulation is 2,527,000 per week
[3] Turnover includes revenues from Joint Ventures. Profits outlined are adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) [4] Command Line Interfaces

About Foundry Networks

Foundry Networks, Inc. is a leading provider of high-performance enterprise and service provider switching, routing, security and Web traffic management solutions, including Layer 2/3 LAN switches, Layer 3 Backbone switches, Layer 4-7 application switches, wireless LAN and access points, and metro routers. Foundry's customers include the world's premier ISPs, metro service providers, and enterprises, including e-commerce sites, universities, entertainment, health and wellness, government, financial and manufacturing companies. For more information about the company and its products, visit www.foundrynet.com.

Media Contact
Tom Herbst / Kate Mills
Kaizo (Foundry Networks)
+44 (0) 20 3043 4151
firstname.lastname@kaizo.net

All Topics