DaimlerChrysler Services South Africa (Pty) Ltd and its subsidiary company, Debis Fleet Management (Pty) Ltd, have appointed SBS Africa Holdings (Pty) Ltd to revamp their networking infrastructure.
In terms of the deal, SBS is replacing most of the networking equipment in the two companies' shared data centre with an end-to-end solution from Intel.
Says Johan Swart, IT Manager at DaimlerChrysler Services: "We had an urgent need to upgrade the network backbone to boost performance and alleviate bottlenecks.
"Based on our long-standing relationship with SBS Africa as a supplier of hardware, software and IT services, we commissioned the company to put together a solution to this problem. The Intel networking products proved to be a price-competitive answer to our requirements."
The new equipment includes two Intel NetStructure 480T Layer 3 Switches; six Intel 510 10/100 switches with Gigabit uplinks; seven Intel 410 10/100 switches; 18 Intel 330 10/100 Hubs and two Intel 460 10/100switches with Gigabit uplinks; 16 new 1000T-network cards connect the servers to the new high-speed backbone.
The first two phases of the project, the installation of a new Fast Ethernet networking infrastructure for DaimlerChrysler Services, and a similar solution for debis Fleet Management are now complete. In the final phase of the project, the Gigabit Ethernet switching and routing capabilities of the NetStructure switches will be fully enabled for the DaimlerChrysler Services companies.
When the project is complete, the new network will serve the needs of around 500 End-users, and cater for file-and-print services, e-mail, database-intensive applications, and Citrix client traffic.
Andrea Nicoll, Senior Account Manager at SBS Africa, says: "After evaluating a number of networking products, we eventually proposed the Intel solution because of its competitive pricing.
"The Intel products are based on industry standards and offered a high-level of compatibility with the existing DaimlerChrysler Services IT infrastructure, including its Compaq Proliant server-farm. In addition, they include strong quality-of-service (Qos) and manageability features."
Sven Beckmann at Intel South Africa adds: "Intel's Gigabit products are based on similar technology to Fast Ethernet for compatibility with existing 100Mbps networks. The Intel solution allows DaimlerChrysler Services to safely and easily adopt next-generation Gigabit technology at its own pace."
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