South African Road Accident Fund (RAF), a quasi-governmental body responsible for compensating road users for losses sustained in road accidents, has upgraded its network between its central campus and remote offices in a move to streamline the flow of information and improve efficiencies for its 1 100 users.
The solution, supplied by Enterasys Networks SA, uses the Enterasys` X-Pedition (formerly SmartSwitch Router) family to reduces congestion and improve availability of the RAF network.
The RAF`s new Gigabit Layer 3/4 solution has allowed the organisation to handle more claims daily and removed the need for staff to work overtime on the registration and payment of claims.
The solution was selected and implemented in association with Olicom Africa, one of Enterasys` leading resellers within the region.
"Our network has become the core of our business. With a centralised database, a high-quality, highly-available infrastructure is essential," said Paul van Niekerk, RAF`s IT Manager. "If I had to do it all over again, I would - only two years earlier. The Enterasys solution marks a new era in our IT productivity, giving us our edge in cost-savings and less downtime."
In SA, almost 10 000 people are killed and 50 000 seriously injured in over 100 000 accidents every year. The RAF`s functions range from providing medical care to offering short-term and life insurance. The organisation generates income from a fuel levy - amounting to R2.1 billion - and pays out on approximately 86 000 claims from some 55 000 incidents annually.
The network serves as the foundation for the RAF`s services with its internal, business-critical applications, including its Human Resources, Budget and Payroll system, which handles all claim payments, deployed across it.
The RAF runs its systems across its WAN from offices at Centurion Park, a campus site in Pretoria. The WAN links the 500 users at the RAF headquarters in the city centre to 200 users in each of three regional offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
The previous network`s inability to prioritise business application data added to its congestion and performance issues. Inherent prioritisation capabilities allow Enterasys` X-Pedition switch/routers to automatically recognise the amount of capacity available and ensure particular applications receive sufficient bandwidth in advance of others.
This has allowed the RAF, during peak periods, to place Web surfing and e-mail behind business-critical applications in the WAN - a significant factor in selecting the Enterasys/Olicom South Africa solution.
The R4 million network, installed over a three-week period, comprises variously-sized Enterasys X-Pedition switch/routers at the IT centre, Pretoria headquarters and the remote locations.
The various VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks) between the sites are linked via a dual Gigabit Ethernet fibre backbone in full-duplex (two-way) mode. The solution includes an external firewall preventing access by unauthorised visitors and hackers.
Numerous business and technical objectives have been reached through the utilization of its new Enterasys high-availability network infrastructure, including:
. increased speed of processing claims;
. increased speed of financial payments to attorneys;
. faster access to online statistics;
. unlimited access to mail data (no size limitation);
. attainment of a maximum of 2% downtime per financial year.
"Network speed has increased by around 200%, with WAN link speeds for the core systems up by 70%. It was only after we installed the Enterasys equipment with its remarkable Quality-of-Service (QOS) options that the pressure was eased on core applications - simply adding bandwidth had no effect at all, yet that is often seen as the logical action to ease congestion.
"Moreover, the RAF is able to register and handle more claims daily and offers a better overall service to its customers. It saves considerable money on WAN link upgrades because the Enterasys system ensures optimum use of the available bandwidth and, due to less downtime, there is far less need for staff to work overtime on the registration and payment of claims," confirmed Niekerk.
Nick Muller, managing director of Olicom Africa, added: "Olicom Africa, a vendor-independent company, carefully evaluated the requirements of the Road Accident Fund before submitting the detailed proposal covering all aspects of the network, including Layer-3 switching among VLANs and the implementation of Layer-4 QOS on the LAN, as well as on the WAN. Olicom Africa evaluated products from leading vendors and then strategically decided to propose the solution from Enterasys.
The Road Accident Fund evaluated proposals from various vendors before finally deciding on the Enterasys solution from Olicom Africa. The Johannesburg Enterasys office assisted Olicom in implementing and fine-tuning the QOS on the LAN/WAN. The implementation was extremely smooth, with the cut-over totally transparent to the users. The relationship that we have with Enterasys is more than just a vendor/VAR relationship."
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