H3C empowers 24 x 7 non-stop business operation at Sunwah Kingsway

"Our business is heavily dependent on making sure that our customers have a secure and reliable access to business critical information as and when they need it and from anywhere in the world," said Samuel K W Kwong, Director, Head of IT Department, Sunwah Kingsway. "Today thanks to H3C we can now comfortably assure our customers that they can rely on us 24x7."

Background

Founded in 1990, Sunwah Kingsway has evolved from a Hong Kong-based brokerage house into a globally focused mid-market financial services provider with a strong track record.

To strengthen its position as a preferred mid-market financial service provider, Sunwah Kingsway recognised the need to upgrade its entire network infrastructure to support future business growth, build a 24-hour non-stop trading platform and seamlessly achieve business resilience with millisecond-level experience. Sunwah Kingsway turned to H3C to help the company design and build its new generation network infrastructure that will enable the firm to achieve its global aspirations while meeting the current and future needs of its expanding client base.

The Solution

As a globally-operating business, Kingsway wanted 24x7 uninterrupted operations on its trading platform and other business critical applications.

At the core of the new network infrastructure is a pair of H3C S7503E switches interconnected with two 10GE's providing multi-service core routing. Using H3C's IRF2 (Intelligent Resilient Framework version 2) virtualization technology, the two S7503E core switches are virtualized appearing as a single core switch with one IP address in both L2 or L3, so the use of Spanning Tree Protocols (STP) can be avoided. The result is millisecond recovery times across the entire network in the event of a core switch component or link failure. The H3C S7503E switch also features 480G switching capacity and 276Mpps throughput, one of the fastest in the market. It is also designed with Carrier-class features like dual power supply, hot swappable interface modules, and comes with built-in multiple services integration capabilities, such as Firewall, IPS, wireless, etc.

H3C proposed S5120SI GE switches to provide full GE wire-speed performance at the access layer. Customers will be able to achieve full L2 features such as ARP detection, IP source guard, ACL and QoS. In addition, the S5120SI can also provide basic L3 features including Static routing and IPv6 support. More importantly, using H3C's IRF2 multiple S5120SI can be stacked as a single logical switch delivering unparalleled performance, resilience and ease of management experience.

Sunwah Kingsway also recognized that mobility is an important aspect of day-to-day business. In this regard, the new network infrastructure will include H3C's AC+FIT Access Point (AP) wireless solution.

User authentication, security control, policy and AP configuration will be centrally controlled by the AC, providing a more secure wireless network. In addition, the brand-new hardware based intelligent antenna WA2620i AP can not only support dual radio 802.11a/n and b/g/n, but also provides unmatched wireless coverage.

Finally, while a mobile workforce is important to the business, it also adds significant burden to network administrators managing the entire infrastructure. The H3C intelligent Management Centre (iMC) brings industry leading management experience around unified wired and wireless management, greatly simplifying network management under a single console platform. In addition, the NTA (Network Traffic Analyzer) module together with S7500E sFlow function can provide customers with full details on network data usage, application usage status – enabling the company to take appropriate action when the need arises.

Why H3C?

Sunwah Kingsway understood the complexity of what it was demanding from its network. The company chose H3C for its technical expertise and deep industry experience which played an important role in identifying the right approach to meeting its business objectives. H3C offered a full suite of networking solutions from core to edge, wired and wireless, and a unified network management approach that is second to none.

In addition, Sunwah Kingsway appreciated H3C's commitment to the success of the project working closely with its partner throughout the exercise to ensure that all aspects of the migration were done on time and on budget.

The Benefits

By deploying the H3C solution Sunwah Kingsway has greatly simplified its network infrastructure. H3C's proven stacking solution – IRF2 – has allowed the company to avoid the use of STP. With the STP-free network, Sunwah Kingsway enjoys an uninterrupted 24x7 non-stop trading platform with similar benefits to business critical applications. Thanks to IRF2 and its millisecond failover feature, convergence time in the network is now down to the millisecond level, which means that any failure in the link or on the network will have no impact on business operations.

H3C also helped Sunwah Kingsway to serve the needs of its employees and staff without introducing unnecessary complexity to the operation. With the H3C iMC network management tool in place, Sunwah Kingsway network administrators will have an easier time managing their wired/wireless network. Topology, alarm, trouble-shooting, device audit can all be done easily from one single unified platform.