Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced that it has supported Gatwick Airport – the UK’s second largest airport and a critical national infrastructure site – in future proofing its entire IT network.
The new network, provided by HPE and Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, allows the airport to take advantage of new, modern technologies for the benefit of airport users – including more than 250 onsite businesses, 30,000 staff and 45 million annual passengers – while also making the network more resilient and tolerant to disruption.
Completed in just 18 months while the airport remained 100% operational, the project had to be completed without any downtime or instability. Similar transitions typically take up to four years, but Gatwick and HPE absorbed the challenges of completing the massive project in less than half the normal time, to ensure Gatwick had the resilience necessary for a critical national infrastructure site and the world’s most efficient single-runway airport.
For Gatwick Airport, resilience and security is absolutely essential in the network. The old network provided a limited number of data paths to communicate between its constituent components – but the new simplified and fully meshed design provides 10 times the number of links for data to traverse the campus, making it much more resilient to disruption. By removing bottlenecks and potential single points of failure, and by utilising a backbone based on many multiples of 40Gb connections, Gatwick’s new network represents a step change in resilience and performance.
The network deal, worth $15 million, was implemented by a team of leading international experts within HPE, Aruba and the Gatwick team. The project strategy has been deliberately streamlined to keep things simple, with HPE designing, implementing, and installing everything from end-to-end. The HPE Pointnext team automated and simplified the complex migration using HPE IP and tools and provided a dashboard for stakeholders and an audit trail of activities.
HPE Pointnext will also provide ongoing management of the new network underpinning the day-to-day running of the airport, including flight information displays, ticketing and baggage services, security surveillance and local commercial activities. HPE will also provide support on the delivery of future projects and provide innovative networking and security solutions via Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.
