CASE STUDIES WIGAN MBC

Wigan MBC utilise Nviron to increase the resilience and availability of their Internet access

Background

The Metropolitan Borough of Wigan lies midway between Liverpool and Manchester, covering an area of 77 square miles. It consists of a number of communities grouped round the two larger towns of Wigan and Leigh, and forms the most westerly part of the county of Greater Manchester. With a population of 310,000 Wigan is the twelfth largest metropolitan district in the country.

Wigan has a deep industrial heritage with coal and cotton being the major employers until the late 20 th century. Since that time the council has worked hard to attract investment and create jobs in modern industries such as IT and leisure.

Problem

Like many forward thinking Metropolitan councils, Wigan MBC is keen to embrace the opportunities for improving service provision that are offered by the Internet. Key parts of this Internet strategy include:

• Universal Internet access for citizens via public libraries and other council run locations
• Acting as an ISP for local schools to enable them to take advantage of the council’s content management and anti-virus infrastructure
• Providing access to council services via the Internet as part of the National government’s e-Government strategy

With Internet access playing such a central role it is important that the council has fast and resilient links that are always available. Over the years Wigan MBC had invested in 3 links to the Internet: 20Mb, 2Mb and a permanent link to NHSnet – the NHS Intranet that provides access to NHS records and applications.

Though the council made use of multiple lines they had no form of automated high availability or load balancing capability and consequently had to manually intervene when a failure occurred.

Solution

Wigan MBC approached Nviron to provide them with a high availability and load balancing system that could transparently integrate with the current setup.

After a thorough analysis of the situation and likely future requirements, Nviron recommended the implementation of a StoneGate system to be placed in front of the current Firewall.

The StoneGate high availability firewall delivers a degree of network security and business continuity that is not possible with traditional approaches. The Multi-Link technology makes Internet connections reliable with built-in multi-homing capability.

For this particular configuration the StoneGate system complemented the existing Firewall. When used as a free standing Firewall solution there is no need for third party clustering or load balancing solutions, as the StoneGate firewall makes it possible to establish a clustered load balancing solution out of the box.

With centralised management, drag and drop configuration and a built-in active traffic filter to protect mobile users, the StoneGate system automatically maintains the fastest possible link to the Internet and eliminates Internet connection as a possible point of failure, without the use of complex routing protocols or additional hardware.

Typically, organisations have had to resort to very complicated and costly solutions such as redundant routers and switches, routing protocols such as BGP and HSRP, and peering arrangements between ISPs. StoneGate's Multi-Link Technology solves this problem by providing highly-available ISP connectivity in a simple and straightforward manner.

This ensures that the council:

• Suffers no Internet access outages or lost connections
• Benefits from reduced overhead costs of system administration
• Requires no additional third party software or hardware
• Does not need to setup complicated protocols or co-operation between ISPs

By accommodating different connection types and ISP’s the solution provides outbound high availability and load balancing for all the current connection lines and caching engines.

In addition it is fully scalable, as new lines from any ISP can be easily added in the future. Since the solution was first implemented the council has added another 20Mb line to its configuration.

The entire solution was configured and managed under Nviron’s NTrust service. This allows an organisation to gain the benefits of increased bandwidth by consolidating multiple circuits into a dynamically balanced data path where fastest route selection is handled transparently via fully managed N Trust gateways provided by Nviron.

The NTrust service gives the council the option of adopting inbound resilience facilities in the future by combining the StoneGate firewall with the Nviron Dynamic DNS service.

Paul Fairhurst of Wigan MBC commented:

“Since we implemented the NTrust solution we have been very pleased with the high availability and load balancing capabilities it provides. We now have, without the need for redundant routers and switches, a solution that ensures that we do not suffer from Internet connection outages or lost connections should a fault occur in one of the lines.

All this is completely invisible to our users who also benefit by the load balancing capabilities of the solution ensuring that they do not suffer any appreciable degradation of service when there are a large number of users online.

The solution also allows us to change our line configuration and ISP supplier at any time without the need for changes to our infrastructure, this flexibility and scalability is important to us as our requirements evolve over the next few years.”