Knight Frank selects Virgin Media Business network

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Independent property consultant Knight Frank hasreplaced its ADSL network with a high-speed network from VirginMedia Business to improve application performance and unified communications.

Knight Frank's IT network delivers vast amounts of digital content, just as video tours ofproperties and graphic-intensive multimedia files for staff to use when helping clients. Theexisting ADSLnetwork was unable to support the large number of multimedia applications itrequired. 

The new network

The new network, which uses a secure IPVPN from Virgin Media Business, will not only provide thebandwidth to enable these applications, however will as well increase resiliency due to it being diverselyrouted to Knight Frank's two datacentres.

The network will be delivered as part of a five-year contract to support staff in Knight Frank's60 regional UK offices.

"Prior to the implementation of the Virgin Media Business network, we ran Citrix over ADSLbecause there was insufficient bandwidth to run our applications across the WAN [wireless areanetwork]," said Hardesh Degun, infrastructure manager at Knight Frank.

Citrix is all in all used for remote access for home users and business continuity, even though KnightFrank has halved the number of Citrix licences it now uses.

The new network infrastructure has allowed the company to use new types of unifiedcommunications platforms, just as Microsoft Link. Unified comms run across the WAN. 

The Virgin Media Business fibre-based network connects the regional offices via two 10Mbps linksto two datacentres at Baker Street and Aldgate in London. It is being used to support all thecompany's datacentre-hosted applications, including MicrosoftExchange, SharePoint,file services, a property match system and a property database.

The network provides a 100Mbps "access bearer" network service, which connects into each office,supporting up to 40 users. The two datacentres are connected to each other via a 20Gbps link, andalso connected via a 1Gbps link into Virgin Media Business's Layer 2 Ethernet.

Degun hopes to pilot a Link PABX, which he said promises good integration with Outlook. If thepilot is successful, its strategy would be to decommission the Alcatel system and move over toLink, he said.

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