ProCurve Networking by HP - Customer stories

	5teUnIT
	“What made ProCurve’s wireless solution ideal for our purpose was its ease of use combined with its flexibility, power and low cost.” Jeppe Degnbol, IT architect, Infrateam, Denmark

Copenhagen’s top innovation centre goes wireless with ProCurve Networking
An ugly old square concrete building recently vacated by Copenhagen University is an unlikely setting for what is being called ‘the most creative environment in Copenhagen’. However, just five minutes from the city centre this building is now the home of an innovation revolution thanks in part to ProCurve Networking.

Called 5teUnIT, the project is an ‘office-hotel’ where cost-effective offices are available for small start-up companies to rent until they have grown big enough to have their own premises. The only stipulation is that the companies should be innovators and many are computer games developers.

With an initial 9,000 sq metres of office space, expected to triple, 5teUnIT offers more than 150 units and from day one has gained a reputation as the city’s smart place for businesses to be seen.

Power problems
When the university recently moved out of the virtually derelict building, it was taken over on a two-year lease by Symbion, a bio-tech innovation project involving the Danish Government and a networking infrastructure included in the lease. However, providing a major networking solution was not viable because the short term lease meant the building would probably be vacated and torn down in two to three years and there was no effective cabling, just coaxial cables which was virtually non-functional. Another challenge was the weak power supply which would collapse if just one laptop computer was plugged in each room.

Wireless networking was seen as the best solution and 5teUnIT’s IT consultants Infrateam set about constructing this using ProCurve Networking technology.

“Innovators don’t need plush buildings but they do need lots of space and very flexible IT solutions,” says Jeppe Degnbol, IT architect at Infrateam. “Ten small companies working together to collaborate on a project often need what a major company would have, so rather than each spending a bit of money on a pointless solution, we set about giving them one enterprise class solution that they could all use.

“It had to be a system that was easy to use. We also wanted to offer an affordable solution that would provide high performance and would enable a lot of people to co-work on the same network. ProCurve’s Adaptive Edge Architecture™ was seen as the ideal solution and has made this possible.”

Performance at low cost
To keep costs down, Infrateam laid just one cable to each office and also installed one private wireless local area network (WLAN) which could be centrally managed and would offer both a public virtual local area network (VLAN) providing Internet access for visitors, as well as individual VLAN’s for each company. The VLAN’s span both wired and wireless networks, and are thus extremely flexible. A solution made possible by EDGE Architecture™, 802.1x authentication.

The main chassis and controller is a ProCurve 5300xl switch equipped with a ProCurve Wireless Edge Services module (WESM). This enables ProCurve wireless access points to be put up thinly all over the building to see how much load will be on them, then more can be added if required – thus meeting demand while keeping down costs. Also added were 24 port Gigabit modules which enable the Internet connection to be terminated direct into the fibre and data to be transported direct into the server room.

To keep down costs, Infrateam also put up a ProCurve Switch 2608 Power over Ethernet (PoE) port to provide power straight to the radio points and ensure that the network would continue to run even in a power crisis.

With so many companies working closely together, wireless security was also an issue. Starting from the bottom up, Infrateam put in a default WLAN with no authentication running through a firewall with limited speed, so visitors can jump straight onto the Internet with no configuration but cannot abuse the system.

Vital security
When companies sign a lease, they are given an individual account that they can punch into their network card. If you are a known user, you get connected to your company’s private VLAN which gives you access to servers, applications and other resources. Those who need their own networks or firewall can also have a private network within the main network.

The big advantage is that companies can move in easily with no backbone switching and patching and can plug into their own network from anywhere.

Management is done centrally using ProCurve Manager Plus (PCM Plus), which manages the VLANs and Wireless Edge Services xl Module (WESM), and ProCurve Identity Driven Manager (IDM) which controls the identity of various companies and users, providing integration to the Microsoft Active Directory for user security.

“What makes ProCurve stand out in this case is its ease of use,” adds Degnbol. “It is ideal and has the correct Edge solution for this kind of scenario with lots of units and the need for low administration costs. We needed a highly flexible wireless network that was affordable and easy to upgrade, and that could also be upgraded by non-trained personnel.”