Jeremy Shulman founded Shulmans Solicitors in 1981. Since then the firm has seen a vast increase in business. This has led to an increased dependency and demand on the IT infrastructure and systems. Inevitably the IT infrastructure was in danger of becoming a victim of the firm’s success.

Due to expansion and increased dependency on IT within the business, the firm embarked on a thorough IT audit and needs analysis. An IT consultancy who specialises in the legal sector “Lights-on Consulting Ltd” was appointed. The resulting report supported Shulmans’ belief that the current infrastructure could not support the future needs of the business and needed to be replaced.

Shulmans Solicitors’ IT department had to find a solution to provide a high speed, robust network with secure Intranet and Internet connectivity which could support the current network requirements and provide a platform for the future. The company have two offices on either side of Wellington Street, these offices had to have a high speed resilient link to enable uninterrupted network access.

Shulmans Solicitors’ IT department had a budget to work to and needed to achieve this without disrupting heavily utilised network services.

Working as always to best practice and design discipline, Express Data recommended an Allied Telesyn SwitchBlade solution be deployed at both sites with desktop connectivity being provided by the flexible range of Allied Telesis 8326/50 edge switches.

The high throughput and highly-available LAN solution was configured for resilience using OSPF and multilink Gigabit technology. This solution exceeded the current requirements and will provide a scaleable platform to meet the future needs of the business.

The SwitchBlade Layer 3-7 chassis switches offers customers a network solution that can scale as their organisation changes. It provides feature-rich, resilient switching technology capable of dealing with multi-casting, IP network control and full Layer 3 functionality and security at an attractive price point.

In addition, SwitchBlade ensures the utmost flexibility.

By using Layer 4+ functionality, network traffic and multi-media applications such as VoIP, broadcast TV and video can be prioritised and streamed across the network.

The solution provided an immediate improvement to network services by increasing the sustainable bandwidth for the connected nodes at the 2 main sites.

The problem of connecting two buildings either side of the main road was solved by the introduction of a trunked 100Mbps wireless bridge.

Express Data continue to provide the highest level of network support to Shulmans Solicitors through both their day-to-day use and their on-going expansion and improvement strategy.