SOTA Technologies
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Customer Profile:

Organization: Columbus Zoo and Aquarium
Location: Columbus, OH, USA
Employees: 200 year-round, supplemented by 500 seasonal staff (May through mid-September)
Market Segment: Entertainment


The Challenge
Founded in 1927, Columbus Zoo and Aquarium today hosts more than one million visitors annually and is home to more than 6,000 animals representing 700 species. Situated along the Scioto River, the zoo grounds cover more than 588 acres, 90 of which are used by the park, as well as a golf course. To serve its customers and retail stores, support its world-class animal research, and provide high quality animal care, the zoo requires an extensive network infrastructure.

Columbus Zoo's legacy 10/100 Mbps (megabits per second) network was faltering as its multi-faceted business grew. The network also offered little redundancy, leaving the zoo vulnerable to a network outage that could shut down a significant part of its operations. A network failure in the zoo's Johnson Aquatic building, for example, would cause the zoo to lose connections to its food court, point of sales registers and many of its zookeepers — compromising revenues, research, and visitors' experience. In addition, the network was ill-equipped to support the zoo's plans to increase its use of video feeds to monitor animal births. The zoo also needed a cost-effective way to increase network ports, particularly during peak periods when it adds 500 seasonal staff.

To address these issues, Columbus Zoo needed an affordable, high-speed, reliable network solution from a proven, tier-one vendor.

The Solution:
After consulting with its value-added reseller, SOTA Technologies, the Columbus Zoo solved its issues with the following 3Com® solutions:
  • 3Com Switch 4060, which delivers a unique combination of performance, availability, and flexibility. The switch's durable metal chassis—a compact, 2RU-high rack-mountable unit—is equipped with 12 1000BASE-SX ports and six GBIC ports for backbone connectivity, as well as six integrated 10/100/1000 ports for server connections. Fault-tolerance features include modular, load-sharing, hot-swappable power supplies, modular, hot-swappable fan trays, and hot-swappable GBIC transceivers. Users can install a second power supply for added power redundancy. It supports 3Com Gigabit Multilayer Switching software, which offers feature-rich Layer 2 functionality, Layer 3 switching for IP networks, and advanced traffic prioritization and security capabilities to accommodate the ever-growing requirements of core Gigabit backbones. The zoo has three pairs of Switch 4060s each connected by an eXpandable Resilient Networking (XRN™) Interconnect Kit.
  • 3Com XRN™ Interconnect Kit, which consists of two modules, an interconnect cable and version 3.0 of 3Com's Gigabit Multilayer Switching software. This saves on administration costs by creating a distributed Gigabit switch fabric that behaves and is managed as a single entity. Performance is maximized because each switch in the fabric is actively switching both Layer 2 and Layer 3 traffic, thus no single unit bears the entire switching load. This solution provides significantly increased network resilience. "Dual homing" of critical devices such as servers to both switches ensures continued network access to the critical devices in the event of a link or switch failure. The "pay-as-you-grow" approach of XRN networks greatly reduces the total cost of ownership within the LAN Core.
  • 3Com SuperStack® 3 Switch 4400, which provides 24 and 48 switched 10/100 ports for high performance Ethernet managed Layer 2 switching with two expansion slots for Gigabit or Fast Ethernet uplinks. It also has enhanced multilayer features that include advanced traffic filtering, Quality of Service (QoS)/Class of Service (CoS) functionality, and optimized telephony support. The zoo utilizes four 48-port and 30 24-port Switch 4400s.
  • 3Com NJ200 Network Jacks, which are fully manageable "in the wall" switches, converting existing wall-mounted RJ-45 Ethernet jacks into four ports, each delivering 10/100 switched Ethernet connections. These allow the zoo to deliver more users Ethernet ports without the complexity, cost and administrative issues of running additional cabling. Columbus Zoo has installed five in different buildings around the campus.
  • 3Com Gigabit Server NICs enable Gigabit Ethernet over copper links to the zoo's servers, accelerating data transfer and information sharing.
  • 3Com® Network Supervisor is a powerful yet easy-to-use application that is downloadable from the web and also ships with all managed 3Com switches and NBX® systems. It maps and monitors the network and quickly alerts administrators to emerging problems. It graphically discovers, maps, and displays network links and up to 1,500 IP devices including NBX telephones and third-party products. It enables stress levels to be monitored, thresholds and alerts set, network events viewed, reports in user-defined formats generated, and device configuration tools launched. When the network changes, 3Com Network Supervisor can be prompted to regenerate the appropriate part of the map to ensure it holds current information. To help manage a large network or accomplish bulk agent updates, it can be used with 3Com Network Supervisor Advanced Package to increase the number of supported devices to 2,500, and further enhance ease of managing agents, and improve productivity with backup/restore and VLANs support for select 3Com switching devices.
Benefits:
Selected over systems from Cisco and Dell for its redundancy, reliability, high-speed and manageability, the 3Com XRN technology-based switching solution is boosting the zoo curators' ability to care for animals, increasing administrators' efficiency, and enabling the zoo to better utilize high technology, such as IP cameras, to monitor animals' births process and enrich customers' experience. Based on the efficiencies gained and the solution's low total cost of ownership, the zoo expects to recoup its 3Com investment within 36 months.

Using 3Com's advanced architecture, Columbus Zoo deployed a distributed network core segmented among three locations, each featuring two 3Com Gigabit Ethernet Switch 4060s linked by a single XRN Interconnect Kit. The XRN technology ensures the zoo has no single point of network failure. It also permits each pair of Switch 4060s to operate and be managed as a single device, doubling bandwidth and port density, while reducing administration. By delivering this functionality in a smaller form factor, 3Com enables the zoo to enjoy the redundancy of a chassis-based solution at a fraction of the cost and space. The pair of Switch 4060s in the business office also supports the zoo's server farm, delivering Gigabit Ethernet links to six servers equipped with 3Com PCI Gigabit NICs (network interface cards).

The Switch 4060s further provide Gigabit Ethernet connections to four 48-port and 30 24-port SuperStack 3 Switch 4400s. The Switch 4400s are located at retail point-of sale (POS) areas, such as food stands, the gift shop, the admission gate, and golf course, as well as administrative offices, research centers, the education building, and animal stands. The intelligent Switch 4400s deliver Fast Ethernet desktop connections, boosting staff efficiency. By supporting the zoo's POS systems the Switch 4400s speed the processing of visitors' purchases and make daily financial reporting faster and easier for administrators.

The 3Com network solution also has significantly enhanced the curators' efficiency and ability to provide more immediate, better care to the zoo's 6,000 animals. With Fast Ethernet to the desktop and a Gigabit Ethernet core, curators now have faster access to the custom, web-based application they use to record daily information on animal diet, medical status, observations and activities. A crucial process to change an animal's diet, which previously took two to three weeks to complete with paper forms, is now conducted over the network in less than three days, ensuring that dietary changes are made quickly to support the animals' health. Curators and keepers can now instantly access critical data in the International Species Information System's (ISIS) animal records keeping system (ARKS) and the MedARKS application for managing veterinary medical records.

The network is also supporting the zoo's use of five IP cameras. An IP camera allows zoo visitors to view an extremely rare baby okapi, a relative of the giraffe with zebra-like stripes on its legs, that was recently born at the zoo but is not yet ready for exhibit. Networked IP cameras also enable zookeepers to monitor animals' birthing process to determine whether their assistance is needed. The zoo also plans to use additional networked cameras for security purposes.

3Com's robust, easy-to-use Network Supervisor application enables the zoo's IT team to monitor, map and, with the Network Supervisor Advanced Package, perform centralized upgrades of switch firmware and configuration backup, saving time and effort. Unique Network Jack NJ200s, which are managed, four-port, wall-mounted Fast Ethernet switches, further enable the zoo to add network connections where needed at a fraction of the cost and complexity of additional cabling and switches. The zoo installed a number throughout the campus, both to make better use of existing cabling and to deliver more ports in new locations even when running new cabling. With the "in the wall" Network Jacks, the zoo gets four connections on each cable run.

"As a non-profit organization, we are keenly aware of making investments that will deliver immediate, yet long-lasting, benefits," said Greg Bell, associate zoo director of finance and information technology at Columbus Zoo. "Our 3Com system has made an immediate positive impact by protecting the zoo from a major network outage, helping us take better care of the animals and boosting the employees' productivity and efficiency. And with the system's flexibility and scalability, we expect to benefit from the network for years to come."