New Yaohan Deploys H3C Wired and Wireless Networks to Support Growth

Background

New Yaohan is Macau’s best-known high-end department store owned by Panda Sociedade de Gestao de Investimentos Limitada, a subsidiary of Sociedade de Tourismo e Diversões de Macau (S.T.D.M.). Opened in December 1997 as the city’s largest department store, New Yaohan has been a long-time fixture of Macau’s retail scene. The nine-storey New Yaohan store is modeled on International high fashion standard with a wide variety of high-end products includes worldwide premium brands.”

Taking advantage of the move to embrace new ideas in store displays and point-of-sale (POS) technologies, New Yaohan selected H3C to install a networking infrastructure at its new location. The project involved designing two networks – wired and wireless – throughout the massive store. The wireless network had to be able to provide excellent coverage to support flexible POS counters, outstanding scalability and reliability for IP phones and back-office operations, and full security and easy management to support business growth.

Technology Solution

Meeting a key requirement for the project, H3C’s solution provides full WiFi connectivity throughout the nine-storey New Yaohan building. The wireless infrastructure is powered by an H3C wireless controller and consists of wireless fit access points and redundant connections to the wired infrastructure. H3C’s S7500E series high performance switch was used in the wired network’s core and connects directly to multiple H3C S5100C series PoE access switches. Wireless connectivity allows New Yaohan to deploy mobile POS counters to increase customer satisfaction and sales through greater checkout convenience.

By designing the core with redundant switches and resilient uplinks from the access switches, the H3C solution offers New Yaohan always-on availability by preventing any single point of failure. These uplink connections between access layer and core switches are running Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MSTP) for load share voice and data traffic. If one of the links fails, both voice and data traffic will transmit over the remaining link to ensure service availability.

Meanwhile, the department store’s operations including over hundreds of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phones required high availability and multiple service support from the networking infrastructure. H3C deployed two chassis-based H3C S7506E core switches as the main backbone network, and H3C S5100-26C-PWR-EI Gigabit power-over-Ethernet (PoE) switch to serve as an edge switch in the access layer for VoIP phones and digital sign displays and workstation connectivity. The S5100-26C-PWR-EI offers advanced security features to prevent ARP spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks.

Why H3C?

New Yaohan chose H3C as its networking partner due to the company’s reputation for outstanding products and excellent service. H3C provided the retailer with professional pre-sale and post-sale support and the best price-for-performance.

After a thorough evaluation process that demonstrated H3C’s understanding of New Yaohan’s IT goals and business objectives, H3C’s solution was selected as the most suitable networking choice that featured key capabilities, such as ARP detection and high availability. With a small team of IT staff, New Yaohan was also impressed with the user-friendly interface and simple to use network management tools that the H3C products offered.

Benefits

Reaching its customers and driving sales are one of the main missions for New Yaohan. In its new department store location, the company wanted to have the flexibility to set up PoS counters anywhere in the building, utilizing the IT systems to support business growth. The H3C wireless solution offers New Yaohan network redundancy, auto channel and power management capabilities to maintain stable wireless coverage, together with a secure wireless roaming environment that enables wireless mobility backed by encryption security for PoS transactions.

New Yaohan’s IT staff can better protect the network using the built-in security of the H3C switches, which can identify rogue APs and other potential infiltrators and can enhance user and/or group security and enforcement by creating virtual private groups, each with unique requirements. The store also benefits from simple and efficient network management provided by the H3C wireless switch manager featuring a graphical user interface that provides real-time MAP (managed access points), RF (radio frequency) coverage and traffic capacity information.