State-of-the-art IT solution with Aruba Edge Services Platform (ESP), and FortiGate firewalls.
About:
Rhodes House is a historic building located in Oxford, England. It serves as the headquarters of the Rhodes Trust, an international scholarship program established in 1902. It is situated in a beautiful setting on South Parks Road, near the University of Oxford’s Science Area.
The building itself is an architectural masterpiece, designed by Sir Herbert Baker in the early 20th century. It combines elements of neoclassical and Georgian styles, featuring intricate stonework, grand halls, and beautiful gardens.
The primary purpose of Rhodes House is to provide a gathering place for Rhodes Scholars, who are exceptional students from around the world selected to pursue postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford.
Requirements:
Rhodes House recently undertook a significant refurbishment and now provides one of the most prestigious conferencing and meeting spaces in Oxfordshire. The house serves as a hub for intellectual exchange, networking and collaboration among the Rhodes Scholars. It offers various amenities, including study spaces, a library, common rooms, and administrative offices, it also hosts lectures, conferences, and social events.
Solutions:
European Electronique (EE) was honoured to be awarded the contract in November 2021 to architect and deliver a LAN solution including wired and wireless infrastructure and firewalls. The Trust required IT systems and infrastructure to consider the architectural design, overall heritage and aesthetics of the building. This presented a number of challenges around the installation of wireless access points and overall aesthetics of our IT solution.
Leveraging our Aruba Platinum and Fortinet Expert Integrator partnerships, EE proposed, designed, and implemented a state-of-the-art solution based upon the Aruba Edge Services Platform (ESP), augmented by FortiGate firewalls.
Deploying our highly skilled in-house resources, EE provided an end-to-end implementation and support services, fitting with the Trust’s heritage and commitment to delivering academic excellence.
To facilitate a smooth transition from the legacy systems, EE’s implementation engineers built the new wired network to run in parallel until completion.
Key integrations were performed alongside the parallel core installation, including Active Directory and several other work packages. Additional core services were established based on the detailed design scope of works, allowing the existing network to continue service whilst establishing a platform to build a pilot site.
Network Access Control, management and monitoring services were deployed in unison to establish a working core environment and distribution switching, and wireless services were also deployed to accommodate all core connectivity.
With the core capable of providing services, EE established a pilot site allowing distribution and access deployment, including User and System Acceptance Testing. Prior to go-live, all services in the core underwent rigorous acceptance testing.
Once all the services were migrated, remaining legacy redundant configuration, such as legacy network management VLANs, were removed from the new solution.
Following the migration of each distribution site the legacy distribution switching was decommissioned after a period of stable running.
EE’s certified Ekahau Survey team undertook a comprehensive site survey to determine the quantity and location of Aruba Wireless Access Points (APs), ensuring adequate coverage and capacity. As Rhodes House is a Grade II listed building it was essential that the mounting of the AP’s was sympathetic to this status.
