ServGate Technologies announced today they are continuing to expand their reseller channel with a partnership agreement with systems integrator Hydra, plc, based in London, UK. This agreement further expands ServGate's presence in the EMEA channel, making its security appliances, which include firewall, VPN, web caching, URL filtering, edge-based virus scanning and more, available to remote office, small and medium businesses.

“Hydra’s offering of high end networking solutions, specialized security expertise and technical support, as well as wide customer base in the European market place makes them an ideal partner for us,” said Jerry Jalaba, Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Servgate. “Hydra has been extremely successful at helping their customers understand the necessity for security technology.

"The European market is mature and anxious for products such as those provided by ServGate Technologies, " said Mark O’Hara, Managing Director for Hydra. “We are confident that together with ServGate, we can provide our customers with trustworthy and comprehensive next-generation security solutions."

"Our agreement with Hydra is of strategic importance to both parties," added Peter Ruyters, Managing Director, EMEA for ServGate Technologies Inc. "Hydra’s presence in the financial district in London, and also their high-end customer base, is of great value to us."
Hydra will offer ServGate’s complete line of security appliances, which feature a unique modular architecture that accommodates network growth by allowing simple upgrades that can be activated with a software key. This “pay-as-you-grow” strategy eliminates the need to replace the security system as network traffic increases, instead permitting the same box to scale to accommodate network expansion.

PRESS RELEASE 03/02/2003 HYDRA BUILDS CONTENT DELIVERY SOLUTION FOR BSKYB

Hydra plc, the systems integrator specialising in networking, web and data centre solutions for blue chip clients, together with Bluecoat Sytems, has designed a content delivery solution for BSkyB. The solution, which uses Bluecoat caches and Cisco Content Services Switches, enables faster and more economical delivery of content for a range of sites hosted by BSkyB, including www.sky.com, Sky News, Sky Sports and many other official football, cricket and rugby sites. The improved serving speed of content by Bluecoat's caches, which outperform most webservers, means BSkyB is saving 280% in the first year on bandwidth usage charges compared with its previous outsourced content delivery service from Digital Island.

Hydra has so far implemented the solution in BSkyB's two London based data centres that deliver all content to European users. BSkyB is investigating installing the same equipment in additional data centres in Hong Kong to serve Asia.

The Bluecoat caches store content from BSkyB's main webservers and delivers it to end users visiting its sites. Hydra's content delivery solution also supports a pay to view internet video service run by Sky, which streams matches, clips and highlights over the internet for nine league teams. The solution was designed to cope with the massive demands placed on BSkyB's busiest sites, such as Sky News, even when floods of people visit the site after major news events.

"Hydra is well versed in the networking problems of media companies. For popular web sites these usually boil down to performance issues, how to support concurrent users or flash crowds, and high bandwidth costs," said MArk O'Hara, Managing Director of Hydra. "The Bluecoat solution Hydra proposed was a reliable option for BSkyB to take control of their content delivery and dramatically reduce costs."

Hydra has implemented similar solutions for parent company of Sky, News International, for its Page3.com and Sportal for the Euro 2000 football championship site. O'Hara continued,"It was our success with News International and Sportal which sparked BSkyB's interest in working with us, and we have mirrored for them the same content delivery solution using Bluecoat and Cisco technology."

With the content delivery solution completely in place, and after successfully going live in November 2002, BSkyB is currently transferring the sites over from Digital Island to Hydra's solution.

"It was interesting working on the BSkyB project, behind the scenes of such hig profile websites," said O'Hara. "Due to a massive number of visitors to these sites everyday we couldn't afford for anything to go wrong. However the joint expertise of BSkyB, Bluecoat and the Hydra team enabled the installation to run smoothly. It was a challenging project, but one that further demonstrates Hydra's commitment to offer our clients pain relief for the speed and cost headaches associated with their networks."

PRESS RELEASE 20/01/2003 HYDRA LANDS DEUTSCHE BANK DEAL TO SPEARHEAD NEW RESELLER DRIVE

Secure mobile access provider Neoteris has signed City-based reseller Hydra to support its growth in the UK financial sector.

As a networking and security expert based in London's financial district, Hydra has been chosen to lead Neoteris' new focus on the financial services industry.

Hydra will handle Deutsche Bank after the institution's recent decision to use Neoteris' Instant Visual Extranet appliance product, which it launched in Europe last October.

"Hydra has become our first specialist reseller in this vertical because it has the right experience and customers," explained Paul Donavan, UK managing director at Neoteris.

"Its customer list is like a Who's Who of financial institutions. We did the deal with Deutsche Bank direct, but Hydra will take over the deal."

Mark O'Hara, managing director at Hydra, said,"This is a big deal and the fact that Neoteris is passing it to Hydra demonstrates that is committed to the channel."

Neoteris runs a 100 per cent channel strategy globally, and believes in medium and long term investments in relationships with resellers.

"We have achieved over 100 per cent growth quarter on quarter over the last four quarters, and the channel has been integral to that," said Donavan.

The company currently has three UK resellers and is not looking for more than about five. Neoteris supplies resellers driect but will review this after 12 months. If sales volumes reach a certain level it will take on a distributor.

O'Hara explained that the vendor's Instant Virtual Extranet appliance enables workers to access the network under Secure Socket Layer sessions from anywhere in the world without the need for dedicated software. He added thatsecuring remote workers offers businesses obvious benefits and is a growth market.

"With congestion charges in London, poor rail infrastructure and the country coming to a halt with the slightest bit of snow, it is clear that companies can benefit from workers carrying out there jobs from home," said O'Hara.

PRESS RELEASE 25/09/2002 HYDRA PARTNERS WITH INKRA NETWORKS TO REVOLUTIONISE ENTERPRISE DATA CENTRE ECONOMICS AND OPERATIONS

Hydra, a systems integrator serving blue chip clients in the city of London, has partnered with Inkra Networks to reduce the cost and complexity of data centres for financial services companies. U.S. based Inkra, which recently announced second round funding of $30.1 million, is launching its Virtual Service Switch (VSS) family of data centre switches into the UK market and has selected Hydra as its first systems integration partner. With Inkra's VSS Hydra will offer enterprises a simplified, high-performance data centre delivery solution, with up to 90 percent lower operational costs.

Inkra's VSS virtualizes data centre appliances, such as firewalls, VPN systems, load balancers and SSL accelerators into a single high-performance switch, removing the need for separate single-purpose appliances. These virtualized services can be arbitrarily combined into discrete logical containers called Virtual Racks, each Virtual Rack emulating a physical rack of data centre appliances. HardWall™, Inkra's unique hardware-enforced resource management technology, ensures separation, fault isolation, and system resources among all Virtual Racks running on a VSS. This enables data centres to deploy multiple dedicated virtual services with the economic and operational benefits of only one system.

"The growing demands on the data centre results in the headache of a complex, spaghetti-like infrastructure which is difficult to maintain and manage," said Mark O'Hara, MD of Hydra. "There is a growing need from financial services companies for simplified and reliable data centre service delivery that is easy to manage and provides the utmost security and integrity of dedicated services."

"We have developed a product that addresses real business needs for reducing the complexity and cost of data centres," said Sanjay Dhawan, CEO and president of Inkra Networks. "Hydra understands our customers' needs as well as we do. Hydra's solid experience in working with leading vendors to solve enterprise networking and security problems, combined with their excellent relationships in the financial services market will be instrumental to our success in bringing about the next generation of the data centres in Europe," said Dhawan.

Inkra's OpenRack™ technology is compatible with existing infrastructures, allowing enterprises to protect investment in traditional appliances. HardWall ensures that enterprises will continue to meet legal requirements for privacy of customer data. The scalability of Inkra's solution gives enterprises the means to progress and grow their data centre at their own pace, and benefit from the increased productivity and profitability this brings.

"Sustaining and growing the delivery of business-critical Web applications is becoming increasingly complex and costly," said Ray d'Urso, head of technical services at Schroder Investment Management. "The combination of integrated service functionality with enforced isolation and performance guarantees, allows the data centre to deliver the application security and performance businesses demand, at minimal overhead cost. Inkra's unique HardWall technology promises that you don't have to sacrifice performance or security for even one application in order to gain the economic benefits of a single, integrated platform. Inkra's VSS helps ensure that conducting business across the Internet is secure, reliable, and much easier on engineering resource and budget alike."

"Hydra has made its name on providing solutions that take the pain away from companies experiencing access, speed, security and cost issues with their corporate network, intranet and the Internet," continued O'Hara from Hydra. "Inkra shares this ethos, and is the only equipment vendor that is delivering on all these requirements for the modern data centre, making its solution a logical and valuable addition to our service. With the addition of Inkra to our vendor portfolio, we are now able to offer enterprises another dimension of Internet pain relief," said O'Hara.

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PRESS RELEASE 06/08/2002 HYDRA PARTNERS WITH RADWARE TO OFFER NETWORK SECURITY AND PERFORMANCE SOLUTIONS FOR CITY BUSINESSES

Hydra plc, a systems integrator specialising in network and Internet pain relief, today announces its partnership with Radware, leader in intelligent application switching ensuring end-to-end control, performance and integrity of network applications. The partnership enables Hydra to offer pain free security and bandwidth solutions to help keep businesses online.

Radware's LinkProof™ and FireProof™ solutions for example, manage and optimise the performance of security devices and ISP links to ensure that these critical network elements deliver ultimate reliability. By integrating Radware's technology, Hydra enables enterprises to keep their network going no matter what, eliminating loss of time and money, and the inconvenience when faults, bottlenecks, contention and security breaches occur, or simply a failure in the leased line.

"Businesses' top three network concerns are speed, security and cost," said Mark O'Hara, Managing Director of Hydra. "And they have become every network manager's headache. Radware's solutions address these fundamental concerns, allowing businesses to ensure their network is always up and running and performing at its optimum in a cost effective way. By solving these problems, they will soon see a return on their investment and benefit from improved e-relationships with customers," he said.

Hydra will be specifying and deploying Radware's range of products, including Radware's FireProofä and LinkProof™ products. FireProof™ is the industry's first security application switch. It guarantees the non-stop operation of all security devices across an enterprise, providing enhanced application security and DoS protection. LinkProofä, is the most widely used Internet link application switch, provides traffic management and load balancing for multiple ISP connections, reducing cost and vitally ensuring high network availability.

"With the recent failure of KPNQwest and the troubles at WorldCom, businesses are developing contingency plans, turning to other carriers should their network fail," continued O'Hara. "We can now help businesses minimise the risk of a critical network failure through integrating Radware's LinkProof solution that load balances over multiple ISP connections."

The partnership with Radware allows Hydra to address the needs of businesses requiring an all-in-one, comprehensive network security and performance solution.

"If an online customer credit card facility goes down, for example, the cost to the business is huge, not to mention the damage it does to their customer relationships. Such businesses rely heavily on their networks and downtime is not an option," said O'Hara. "By integrating Radware's products, Hydra can provide a complete solution so they can affordably manage and the all the major factors that cause network disruption and downtime," he said.

O'Hara is pleased to be working with Radware. "Their products complement our area of expertise and support our philosophy to offer network and Internet pain relief," he said.

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PRESS RELEASE 10/07/2002 HYDRA AND REDLINE NETWORKS TO BOOST WEB SITE AND DATA CENTRE PERFORMANCE

Hydra plc, the city based systems integrator specialising in network and Internet pain relief, has become the first UK reseller partner for Redline Networks, the pioneer in Web I/O Acceleration technology. Together, Hydra and Redline will alleviate the frustration of slow web site performance by offering Redline's Web I/O Acceleration products to data centres and e-commerce companies. Customers realise big performance gains on their web server farms and at the same time reduce their bandwidth costs. Web surfers benefit from faster web page downloads, even when using a dial up modem.

With Redline Networks, Hydra will be able to offer a new solution to clients suffering web server over load or network problems resulting from the implementation of an Intranet. Redline's T/X Web I/O Acceleration product range has been designed to solve Internet bottlenecks from both the server and the network angle, removing responsibility for opening and closing TCP/IP sessions from the server, thereby freeing up processing power and dynamically increasing data centre performance. The products also compress the retrieved data to ensure a better browsing experience for the end user.

"We are very excited to be working with Redline Networks," said Mark O'Hara, Managing Director at Hydra. "The T/X product range is a new slant on the web server acceleration problem which will work with customers' existing solutions. With purse strings tight in the e-business economy at the moment the benefits are huge," said O'Hara. "Download speed is crucial to gaining and keeping customers and this product makes significant performance increases in the data centre that the user really sees," he said.

The Redline range consists of the T/X 2000, 2200 and 2250 Accelerator appliances and the company has recently added SSL support so the product can now compress even secured data. The T/X 2000 is a single cluster (32 server) enterprise device for companies struggling with a corporate Intranet; the T/X 2200 is a data centre device able to accelerate a massive 64 clusters of 32 servers per cluster which also features software SSL support, while the T/X 2250 adds hardware SSL support.

"Our solution takes away responsibility for TCP requests from the web server, freeing the server to deliver data much faster," said CTO and co-founder of Redline, Israel L'Heureux. "Then our compression technology significantly decreases the bandwidth needed to transmit a page of data and further boosts the speed to the end user. Because Redline's capability is unique, both dial-up modem and broadband users experience a performance increase," he said.

"We chose Hydra because they have an excellent history of bringing emerging technology to market and helping the customer understand the benefits of the technology. We expect strong market demand for our products in the UK because of the large installed base of data centres and e-commerce companies; in fact the UK should contribute around 50 percent of our total EU revenue," said Paul Gracie, Redline Networks Sales Manager for Northern Europe.

"The product is an excellent match for Hydra as we have carved a reputation as Internet pain relief specialists through our relationships with Internet acceleration companies like CacheFlow and Expand Networks. Redline allows us to widen our web acceleration offering and deliver a solution that combines performance with a fast return on investment," concluded O'Hara of Hydra.

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PRESS RELEASE 09/05/2002 HYDRA TO OFFER "PAIN RELIEF" FOR INTRUSION DETECTION HEADACHES

Hydra, a leading systems integrator serving blue chip clients in the city of London, has teamed up with Blade Software and hardware security vendor Top Layer Networks to provide the ultimate 'pain relief' for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). With Blade Software, Hydra is able to offer city firms a simple and safe way to launch attacks against existing IDS systems to identify areas that are vulnerable to attack. Hydra also offers firms the means to correct any weaknesses in the IDS set up, with solutions from Top Layer Networks.

Intrusion Detection Systems are regarded as a priority investment in many companies because they provide protection for the 80% of all network attacks and intrusion attempts which arise from internal sources. Firewalls cannot provide any protection in this area, making IDS the new 'must have' security solution.

The increase in the number of internal attacks has prompted a large number of companies to use IDS as a second layer of defence, but companies are not deploying IDS throughout their network properly to provide 100% detection of network security threats. IDS is notoriously unscalable so for complete network coverage, companies need to deploy a single IDS on every link which is very expensive, and offers no redundancy. Companies are therefore limiting IDS deployment to critical areas in the network, leaving large areas of the network unmonitored. Furthermore, a lot of companies also fail to configure their IDS to suit their network, leading to false alerts, which waste time and lead to a "cry wolf" mentality where genuine threats are ignored until it is too late.

"Hydra do not sell IDS and are therefore able to provide independent advice and 'pain relief' to companies that have already deployed or are looking to deploy IDS," said Mark O'Hara, managing director of Hydra. "With Blade Software's IDS Informer we are able to offer our customers an IDS health check. It allows you to safely attack your own network and make sure that everything is working as it should; you can then fine-tune your IDS for the best possible defence," O'Hara said.

The IDS Informer 3.0 from Blade Software can simulate any number of common network attacks at speeds which your IDS can cope with. It allows companies to launch an attack against their IDS under controlled conditions, without harming the network. By monitoring the results, companies can then see if their IDS is able to recognise the latest attacks. IDS Informer has a store of over 320 attacks, and similar to anti virus software, it is able to update its database and provide regular tests on the network.

"Usually we find that companies are simply struggling to cope with the amount of data on their network," said O'Hara. "One solution is IDS Balancer from Top Layer Networks; by aggregating the traffic to your IDS sensors, the device improves the efficiency of your IDS, increases network coverage and reduces the bandwidth bottleneck with no disruption to the network," he added.

Top Layer's IDS Balancer uses a patented Flow Mirroring technique to replicate entire data flows across multiple IDS. Normally an IDS will cope with speeds of around 30Mbps before entering sampling mode and beginning to miss packets. The IDS Balancer can work at up to Gigabit speeds to make sure that your IDS array does not allow malicious packets through the network undetected. The product is also able to add fault tolerance, scalability and redundancy to the network security.

With Blade Software and Top Layer Networks, Hydra are able to offer a simple test to make sure your network security can cope with the demands placed upon it. If a fault has been discovered then the IDS Balancer can solve most issues without the need for an expensive forklift upgrade. With regular testing and a scalable, resilient security solution companies can look at intrusion prevention rather than intrusion detection, to identify security holes before it is too late.

"IT managers have really got to be on their toes at the moment," said Mark O'Hara. "Malicious attacks are getting easier to carry out with many 'tools of the trade' for hackers available as downloads on the web. As companies rely more and more on their Internet connection to share information amongst employees, it is now vital to improve network security, not only to protect this information but to protect the company reputation too. By offering firms the Blade Software and Top Layer products, Hydra has a network security package which significantly reduces the risk of successful network attacks."

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PRESS RELEASE 26/04/2001 CITY NETWORK INTEGRATOR BUILDS BRIDGE FROM LONDON TO STOCKHOLM

Leading advertising agency St Luke's Communications is revolutionising the way its staff works by installing new wide area network infrastructure for remote offices and mobile personnel.

The development is part of an upgrade performed by City-based network and Internet specialists, Hydra PLC, to improve on St Luke's existing data network infrastructure. Hydra has worked at St Luke's offices both in Euston, London and central Stockholm, as well as at the client's co-location facilities in Wapping, London.

In the last 18 months, Hydra has replaced a legacy LAN system with a scalable, high performance LAN/WAN system that employs Cisco routers and switches at its core.

On the LAN, a chassis-based, modular Catalyst 6000 switch delivers a backplane bandwidth of 32 Gbps and multi-layer switching at up to 30 Mpps. St Luke's is already making use of 100Mbps desktop and server connectivity. They will shortly be using this infrastructure to deliver a LAN-wide thin-client system, as well as gigabit-over-fibre for their network servers. Within 6 months, St Luke's will be making use of another Catalyst 6000 unit for a second site in London, with gigabit connectivity between sites, and gigabit-over-copper for their design studio workstations and printers.

To facilitate WAN connectivity, Cisco 3600 series routers were installed in St Luke's London and Stockholm offices. This router offers over 70 modular interface options, providing solutions for data, voice video, hybrid dial access, virtual private networks (VPNs), and multi-protocol data routing. The high-performance, modular architecture protects customers' investment in network technology and integrates the functions of several devices into a single, manageable solution.

All of the equipment installed in St Luke's Stockholm office was assembled and tested by Hydra engineers in London in order to minimise logistical problems for the installation team in Sweden. Hydra created a test virtual network in England to ensure problem-free implementation.

The Cisco 3640 router supplied and installed by Hydra is also giving the client tangible business benefits in that remote users are able to dial directly and securely onto the network via ISDN or analogue connections when working from home or travelling on company business.

To secure the network, St Luke's are running two Cisco PIX firewalls in stateful failover mode together with a Catalyst 2924 (24-port switch with 10/100Mbps autosensing ports). These switches are extremely flexible in the way they can be integrated into existing structures, meaning that a network can be upgraded gradually so spreading cost over time and minimising disruption to the client's core business.

Hydra has also supplied St Luke's with Cisco Secure, which authenticates dial-in users as well as providing reports on the nature and duration of access. These precautions are a subsidiary level of protection running below the primary PIX firewalls, which protect the network from the outside world.

St Luke's plan to add to their portfolio of dial-up services by integrating a major global ISP's dial-up network with Cisco Secure, Cisco PIX and their Cisco 3640 routers, as well as other integrated and centralised network resources. Web hosting is also a logical and imminent progression and it is likely that Hydra will advise the client on related security issues and implement appropriate technology.



St Luke's are proving to be one of Europe's most successful and innovative advertising and communication agencies and the company has fast-track expansion plans. Their client list includes British Telecom, Ikea, Telia, IPC, Travelocity, Clarks and several Government accounts. The agency's policy of hot-desking and replacing conventional offices with "brand rooms" has proved popular with employees and clients and the company is characterised by a non-hierarchical management structure and employee co-ownership.

Edward Avenell from the IT team at St Luke's: "Part of St Luke's strength comes from its flexibility & adaptability. Technology forms a major part of this, both in our business practice and in our work ethic. We need a network that can grow and evolve with us, especially as we look at new global markets and new ways of working. We also have to be able to demonstrate our understanding of technology to our clients, many of who are themselves technology leaders. As a small department and a high-tech company, we need cutting edge technology that works and a partnership with a network provider that can help us implement this. Hydra have demonstrated their ability to react to our needs, giving personal service as well as corporate reliability."

Mark O'Hara of Hydra comments: "It's an innovative installation because we have progressed the client from a Cabletron LAN to a Cisco network infrastructure. St Luke's have upgraded to a gigabit backbone and are now running 100 megabytes to the servers and desktops. It's a 250-user network which is producing tangible business benefits for staff from all departments within the company."

O'Hara continues: "The client company is a forward-thinking ideas factory with exceptionally high levels of staff retention. St Luke's have clear expectations of how they want IT to progress their business. This approach stems from a corporate philosophy based on empowerment of individuals. Current expansion plans include additional offices in continental Europe."

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PRESS RELEASE 28/03/2001 HYDRA INTEGRATE LOWE LINTAS

City-based network and internet specialists Hydra plc have recently upgraded the Lowe Lintas network in the ad agency's UK office in Knightsbridge as part of a £230k contract.

Following the 18-month old merger of The Lowe Group with Ammirati Puris, Lowe Lintas is now the UK's third largest advertising agency and the fourth largest advertising agency in the world. A blue chip client list includes Tesco, HSBC, Unilever and Vauxhall, and billings exceed £325 million.

Hydra have upgraded Lowe Lintas' entire local area network and installed Enterasys Matrix E7 switches to create a resilient and functional LAN infrastructure. Lowe Lintas are among the first companies in the UK to install this leading-edge switching technology.

According to the Group's IT Director for Europe & Africa Guy Hanton, the upgrading of the networking infrastructure is just a component of the IT strategy which will roll out over the coming years worldwide.

The Matrix E7s are operating in tandem with Smart Switch 6000s to provide a high capacity, fast ethernet/gigabit datacentre switching solution which is providing 100 megabits to desktops. Hydra have installed gigabit fibre uplinks from Lowe Lintas' Netware and NT servers.

The client is reaping immediate business benefits through the application of gigabit technology and the ability to add many more users to the network without the need for additional switches. The new switches are significantly superior to older, chassis-based switches; they sustain greater port density to the matrix and have larger backplanes.

Recent highlights for Lowe Lintas include launching the world's first combined television and Internet channel, a £10m contract with Priceline.com and the new global launch of Merrill Lynch HSBC.

Mark O'Hara of Hydra comments: "We were awarded the contract with Lowe Lintas on the strength of our track record in the advertising, PR and media sectors. Hydra has supplied Lowe Lintas with a network that can develop as the company expands without any loss in speed or integrity. The port density on the Enterasys switches installed is exceptionally high. The application is notable in that while many companies are installing gigabit backbones into their networks, few are sufficiently forward-thinking to run gigabit to the servers."

Mark O'Hara continues: "Many companies with high levels of PC literacy are currently running their servers on 100 megabytes. Lowe Lintas are running 100 megabytes to their workstations. Staff involved in graphic-intensive work have seen immediate improvements in performance. "

A key role of IT at Lowe Lintas is managing the assets that are the group's creative product. A centralised information source is vital for a multinational company and now that the entire creative archive is being digitized in-house, a resilient and speedy network can permit access to the entire group worldwide.

The first year or so of Guy Hanton's tenure as head of IT was made up of he and his team visiting the group's offices around the world -discussing and setting standards, for local and worldwide requirements.. "Getting a good blueprint set of standards for our agencies gives us the foundations for future worldwide projects," says Hanton. "I can now focus on the future, improving communications and investigating the new technologies that we could be using in our industry. ."

Lowe Lintas were recently named UK and European Advertising Agency of the year by Advertising Age and Campaign magazines.

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PRESS RELEASE 07/12/2000 UMBRO INTERNET BUSINESS

Sportswear giant Umbro crowned 76 years of pioneering achievement by launching its online service to allow the public to buy sports goods on the internet. umbro.com has been offering full e-commerce functionality since April this year.

After approving the broad strategy, it fell to Umbro IT chief Bernie Thurston to project manage the design of a platform that offered full e-commerce functionality while simultaneously allowing for localized editorial content.

The aim was to have a fully functional site ready for launch in early July to coincide with the issue of Manchester United's latest strip. A fitting launch point and a tough benchmark for Umbro to attain, given United's massive worldwide following.

Having decided on a Sun and Oracle-based Web server infrastructure, Bernie Thurston, began to look for a load-balancing solution to manage the traffic among the servers. CommentsThurston, "The Arrowpoint CS800 met our requirements perfectly as they can do all we need and more. We can use more of the switches' capabilities as we need them, so we can let them grow with the site without having to commit to too much extra hardware in the early stages.

Initially, Umbro will use two ArrowPoint CS800 switches to load-balance the traffic across the London based servers. Umbro will also immediately reap the benefits of the ArrowPoint's highly effective security measures, such as the denial of service (DoS) attack prevention.

About the ArrowPoint CS800
The ArrowPoint CS800 switch is a high-performance, chassis-based switching solution for large, high-traffic Web sites. The ArrowPoint switch enables Web and application service providers, Web content providers, and enterprises engaged in e-commerce to build global Web networks optimised for e-commerce transactions and Web content delivery. With its patented content-switching technology, the switch gives businesses maximum control in allocating Web site resources and building services for optimal return on investment (ROI). Having recently been acquired by Cisco, the ArrowPoint range is in the process of being rebadged as the Cisco 11000 series.

The switch also supports wire-speed flow forwarding based on the requested content's full URL, as well as user cookie and extensive resource verification information.

"I was really impressed by the competency and quality of the engineers from Hydra who came to help us with the installation," says Thurston. "They were immensely professional and they helped us to configure the switches to suit our requirements exactly. They also helped us to identify and solve problems in the network, allowing us to finish the initial project in record time.

As demand grows, Umbro will establish new servers and points of presence (POPs) across Europe, the Far East, and the United States, using the switches to manage load- balancing on a worldwide basis. As the infrastructure grows, more of the switches' sophisticated content-aware features will be implemented. Umbro will start to use the switches to manage the content across the network, where content updated in one location can be replicated automatically across all other servers. This function also helps ensure against flash crowds, where demand peaks at an abnormally high rate, which can bring servers down. The switches can automatically replicate the pages that are most popular onto new servers or caches. In this way, Umbro can be sure that visitors always receive the content they request.

Umbro has been delighted with the success of the site having already sold football kits to all corners of the globe, with predictably high levels of sales of Manchester United strip to fans as far afield as China and Kuala Lumpur.

"The kind of working relationship between the vendor and the integrator that I saw between Hydra and ArrowPoint is definitely the shape of things to come," concludes Thurston. "Each is as knowledgeable about the other's business and they're quick to understand the end-users' business too. Frankly, any reseller that can't do that, I'm not interested in."

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PRESS RELEASE 31/10/2000 HYDRA'S WEMBLEY FIXTURE

City-based network and Internet specialists Hydra plc have provided acceleration and load-balancing facilities to assist QXL.com plc, Europe's leading online auction house. QXL.com used the equipment to process the exceptionally hot page traffic during the recent auctioning of memorabilia at Wembley Stadium.

Since May 17th QXL.com. have auctioned thousands of Wembley items ranging from shirts to seats, turf to turnstiles and flags to fixtures. The most valuable single item was a piece of turf from where the ball landed in the controversial goal from the 1966 England vs Germany World Cup final. The turf was sold to Chelsea chairman Ken Bates for £22,000.

Mark O'Hara of Hydra comments: "QXL.com were concerned that the high profile of the auction might create so much hot content traffic that the overall performance of their site would suffer. Hydra were brought in to ensure that the site would give constant performance levels."

Mark O'Hara expands on the project's background: "QXL are currently receiving upwards of 40 million page impressions per month. Rather than adding a large number of expensive servers we installed CacheFlow appliances in front of the site together with a Cisco Content Services Switch 11000 (formerly ArrowPoint) as a load-balancing solution in front of the firewall."

"The installation has had the effect of offloading traffic and ensuring that a large proportion of users receive content from the caches. The CacheFlow and ArrowPoint solutions have allowed us to iron out the performance graphic of the QXL.com site."

The CacheFlow approach allowed Hydra to add redundant power supplies and disks, so building in an exceptional level of resilience. Since its website is QXL.com's core business, single points of failure could not be tolerated.

It was crucial that downtimes should be minimal and Hydra's engineers performed the work at QXL.com's Hammersmith office at three o'clock in the morning. A major challenge was the integration of managed services from QXL.com's ISP with third party routing equipment but this was achieved with minimal delay.

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PRESS RELEASE 19/07/2000 CACHEFLOW AND EURO2000 ON THE WEB

Hydra plc is a City-based network and internet access service. They have been involved with some of the most prestigious installations in the UK.

As the busiest website ever created, the Euro 2000 website received 150 million page impressions per day.

UEFA wanted the Euro 2000 site to be a real attraction for fans rather than a mouthpiece for UEFA. Attractive content such as streaming video would have been of little use if fans were unable to access it due to overloaded servers. The need to hold the information as close as possible to the user accessing the site was paramount.

The site designers, Sportal and PSInet specified 28 CacheFlow 500 series caching servers located in ten cites across Europe and the US.

Nigel Hawthorn of CacheFlow commented: 'The network infrastructure had to push up-to-date information to all the caches, ensuring that content was always fresh. There were bound to be extraordinary peaks in traffic and regional variants for matches such as England vs Germany. The whole network was centrally driven with content pushed out via switches to distributed caching servers. The site achieved 1.4 billion hits in a six weeks and all data was served from CacheFlow caches.'


TOP LAYER SOLUTION AT NETDECISIONS

Leading e-commerce solutions provider netdecisions, has the in-house expertise to deliver a total e-commerce solution. netdecisions provides services in four dimensions; business strategy definition, user experience definition, technical solutions integration, and deployment/configuration.

It provides networking architecture to support its own and its customers' Internet requirements, that is independent of any one networking platform. To be able to offer QoS agreements to their customers, netdecisions decided to implement breakthrough layer 7 switching technology from TopLayer Networks.

Andy Cowie, of netdecisions comments: "Top Layer contacted us while we were looking at our business requirements. When we appreciated AppSwitch's functionality we knew we had to get it in!"

One AppSwitch installed within netdecisions' hosted network environment can support 20 hosted sites, although they were actually implemented in pairs for failover, to support the company's entire hosted business.

netdecisions needed to allocate guaranteed bandwidth to customers with the facility to charge customers for exceeding dedicated bandwidth usage. In this way netdecisions was able to implement a fairer method of billing based on actual network usage.

Another function is guaranteed bandwidth for video streaming, without this impacting on the overall Internet site. Top Layer offered layer 7 application prioritisation, with load balancing technology while the network still operated at wire speed.


HYDRA AND CACHE FLOW

Hydra currently sells more CacheFlow equipment in EMEA than any other CacheFlow partner. Hydra's Managing Director Mark O'Hara expects e-commerce applications to grow at ever increasing rates.

"The creative forces devising the most lucrative concepts have been caught up by the technological innovators," states O'Hara. "Manufacturers now have the technological muscle to be as creative in product design as the most ambitious e-commerce concepts around."

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PRESS RELEASE 19/07/2000 CACHEFLOW AND EURO2000 ON THE WEB

Hydra plc is a City-based network and internet access service. They have been involved with some of the most prestigious installations in the UK.

As the busiest website ever created, the Euro 2000 website received 150 million page impressions per day.

UEFA wanted the Euro 2000 site to be a real attraction for fans rather than a mouthpiece for UEFA. Attractive content such as streaming video would have been of little use if fans were unable to access it due to overloaded servers. The need to hold the information as close as possible to the user accessing the site was paramount.

The site designers, Sportal and PSInet specified 28 CacheFlow 500 series caching servers located in ten cites across Europe and the US.

Nigel Hawthorn of CacheFlow commented: 'The network infrastructure had to push up-to-date information to all the caches, ensuring that content was always fresh. There were bound to be extraordinary peaks in traffic and regional variants for matches such as England vs Germany. The whole network was centrally driven with content pushed out via switches to distributed caching servers. The site achieved 1.4 billion hits in a six weeks and all data was served from CacheFlow caches.'


TOP LAYER SOLUTION AT NETDECISIONS

Leading e-commerce solutions provider netdecisions, has the in-house expertise to deliver a total e-commerce solution. netdecisions provides services in four dimensions; business strategy definition, user experience definition, technical solutions integration, and deployment/configuration.

It provides networking architecture to support its own and its customers' Internet requirements, that is independent of any one networking platform. To be able to offer QoS agreements to their customers, netdecisions decided to implement breakthrough layer 7 switching technology from TopLayer Networks.

Andy Cowie, of netdecisions comments: "Top Layer contacted us while we were looking at our business requirements. When we appreciated AppSwitch's functionality we knew we had to get it in!"

One AppSwitch installed within netdecisions' hosted network environment can support 20 hosted sites, although they were actually implemented in pairs for failover, to support the company's entire hosted business.

netdecisions needed to allocate guaranteed bandwidth to customers with the facility to charge customers for exceeding dedicated bandwidth usage. In this way netdecisions was able to implement a fairer method of billing based on actual network usage.

Another function is guaranteed bandwidth for video streaming, without this impacting on the overall Internet site. Top Layer offered layer 7 application prioritisation, with load balancing technology while the network still operated at wire speed.


HYDRA AND CACHE FLOW

Hydra currently sells more CacheFlow equipment in EMEA than any other CacheFlow partner. Hydra's Managing Director Mark O'Hara expects e-commerce applications to grow at ever increasing rates.

"The creative forces devising the most lucrative concepts have been caught up by the technological innovators," states O'Hara. "Manufacturers now have the technological muscle to be as creative in product design as the most ambitious e-commerce concepts around."

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PRESS RELEASE 22/06/2000 HYDRA WINS CONTRACT FOR TOP PR FIRM

City based network and internet specialist Hydra plc has recently installed a new network infrastructure at the London offices of Burson-Marsteller, the largest Public Relations company in the world.

The IT team at Burson-Marsteller recognised that there was extreme pressure being placed on the existing shared ethernet network and that new applications would soon cause severe problems and possible downtime. They needed a solution that would not only deliver the required bandwidth today but also be a scalable platform for future growth. The other key element was network management which needed to be both practical and provide detailed information on traffic flows.

With personnel in excess of 2,000 employed in 30 countries, Burson-Marsteller is part of the Young & Rubicam Group.

The new computer network is based on market leading Gigabit ethernet technology developed by Hewlett Packard. The design utilises a collapsed backbone architecture using the HP 9308 as the core switch. Gigabit fibre uplinks run from the HP 9308 to individual HP 2424s (24 port 10/100 switches) located on each of the floors, giving a total of 400 user ports.

Burson-Marsteller chose Hydra to design and install the new network because they showed the best understanding of Burson's requirements and could demonstrate a proven track record in both installing similar networks and also providing unparalleled ongoing maintenance and support.

Burson-Marsteller IT director Gareth Bruce expressed his satisfaction with the project, saying "Hydra and HP worked closely with our IT staff in bringing the project in on time and on budget. The new network gives us the reliability and resilience we need, but will also allow us to support the continued expansion of our business."

Heather Renfree, HP Channel manager was also enthusiastic: "Hydra's professionalism, combined with the HP product range, have given Burson-Marsteller an excellent solution which will serve them well for the foreseeable future."

Hydra MD Mark O'Hara commented "It is especially pleasing to have won a significant project for HP, who are becoming an increasingly prominent force in networking. As a technically led company ourselves, it is good to see customers who are prepared to challenge technical issues rather than simply opting for the established solutions."

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PRESS RELEASE 08/05/2000 HYDRA IN VOGUE

Hydra plc has recently installed CacheFlow equipment and an ArrowPoint content aware web switch for CondéNet.UK Ltd., the on-line division of Condé Nast Publications Ltd at the Company's London headquarters, Vogue House.

Immediate commercial benefits have been seen on the Company's various webpages including vogue.co.uk, cntraveller.com, gq-magazine.co.uk and tatler.co.uk. Condé.Net.UK are able to store regularly accessed data on their CacheFlow and away from their webserver. This has halved download times from an average of 16 seconds to eight, allowing readers to view more pages during each visit and resulting in higher advertising revenue for the publisher. The UK Vogue site alone is delivering 1.25 million page impressions a month.

Since the CacheFlow is able to process content quicker than a webserver, users of the websites benefit in terms of speed of response. As a knock-on effect, the presence of the data on the CacheFlow rather than the webserver gives the Condé Nast website more scaleablity and resilience to factors such as flash flooding. Condé Nast are reporting that at present about 80% of the data accessed from their website comes from the CacheFlow.

Hydra has also implemented ArrowPoint at Vogue House. This is a content aware switch which employs Layer 5 technology to ensure that traffic can be seamlessly redirected to the most appropriate destination. The switch is unrivalled for its ability to evaluate server and caching performance intelligently and prioritise Internet traffic intelligently.

Emile Joubert of Condé Nast comments: 'The immediate commercial benefit of the Hydra solution is reduction of web server bottlenecks. This is significant for us in terms of advertising revenue which is generated through the frequency of site visits. Advertisers pay a fee for every page visited. With download times being halved, site visitors are viewing more pages per visit and more bandwidth is available to accommodate higher numbers of users.'

CacheFlow and ArrowPoint products work well together and Hydra are installing them in a number of different environments. Mark O'Hara of Hydra comments: 'We have identified several key application areas, the most important being the enhancement of quality of service in ecommerce, customer response times and intelligent use of caching. The combination of the two products gives customers the best of both worlds, resulting in significant website performance improvements.'

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PRESS RELEASE 21/02/00 HYDRA ENHANCE ECOMMERCE

City-based Internet network service provider and internet access manager Hydra plc have adopted ArrowPoint, a layer 5 switching technology as part of their internet access acceleration solutions.

Hydra has identified several key application areas, the most important being the enhancement of quality of service in ecommerce, customer response times and intelligent use of caching.

ArrowPoint switches allow users to be differentiated according to type and frequency of usage, giving the data provider the option to direct valued users to faster servers or caching devices. The advance into layer 5 switching architecture means that different types of internet traffic can be identified and http traffic can be distinguished from say ASCII files or graphical data.

These switching techniques can also monitor how long a customer has been looking at a particular site while making a buying decision. The vendor can email customers several days later and ask if they are nearer to making a purchase or offer more information.

Mark O'Hara of Hydra comments: 'We are anxious that hosting companies should benefit from the latest developments in content awareness and redirection technology. Following successful implementation by Condé Nast, we are in discussion with a number of major companies who are considering implementation of layer 5 switching solutions.'

Hydra will also be able to offer customers an intelligent means of load-balancing with the introduction of the ArrowPoint switching solution. By assessing what kind of traffic is being received, users can dedicate networks to servicing particular kinds of request, caching objects onto appropriate devices. This approach reduces the likelihood of 'flash floods' and server meltdown.

Mark O'Hara continues: 'Classifying Internet traffic and then distributing it intelligently to appropriate server farms has to be more effective than trying to mirror whole Websites. If one of our clients has a successful promotion, level 5 technology ensures that excess traffic can be seamlessly redirected to an overflow server. This is the direction which ecommerce is now taking but the advances rely on constant evaluation of server and caching performance and the intelligent categorisation of different kinds of internet traffic.'

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PRESS RELEASE 21/02/00 HYDRA POLICE THE NET

Nearly 2 out of 3 companies in the United States have been obliged to discipline staff for Internet abuse and nearly 1 out of 3 companies have terminated employment for the same reason. These findings come from a survey conducted with 224 human resource directors at the Centre for Internet Studies in California.

In the wake of these findings, City-based network service provider and internet access manager, Hydra plc, have adopted Websense, a unique set of filtering devices for internet traffic.

The software is automated and therefore eliminates the costly need to employ people to scrutinise internet activity.

Hydra's clients demand flexible architecture that can adapt to almost any network configuration. The Websense product can be installed as a stand-alone proxy server, as an integrated or plug-in component of third party proxy servers or as part of popular firewalls. The monitoring module observes network-to-internet traffic and logs information based on parameters from management modules. Users benefit from reports on type of sites visited, bandwidth consumed and attempted violations of internet policy.

Websense is one of the most powerful tools employers can use to prevent internet abuse by staff but at the same time, the software allows for considerable flexibility in set-up. A useful feature is the ability to be less restrictive as to what employees can access after say 5.30 in the afternoon. Significant investment has been put into assessing and evaluating internet sites world-wide. Personnel directors at client companies can use this research to tailor internet availability to suit corporate culture and rules.

Much attention has been given to a recent case in the English High Court which saw the BBC sued by a female employee after she was offended by a male colleague downloading a pornographic screensaver. There have also been several instances where staff at major blue chip companies have been found playing computerized gambling games. Not only is the call-time billed to their employers but gaming losses as well!

Websense will appeal to many at boardroom level since it effectively rules out the possibility of such occurrences. However, the Internet is a crucial research tool in many industry areas and to deny internet access to staff is often impractical.

Mark O'Hara of Hydra comments: 'A common problem is that of the company which has formulated a sensible policy on internet misuse, but has not found the means of implementing that policy effectively. By adopting a market-leading product, Hydra now allows customers to enforce practical and sensible measures towards internet regulation without restricting access to legitimate sites. '

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PRESS RELEASE 24-08-99 CITY NETWORK INTEGRATOR HYDRA HELPS CLARIFY NEW BRITISH STANDARD ON NETWORK SECURITY

Computer network security is a long-standing cross that network managers and end-users have had to bear. Its prominence has come to the fore recently with the increase in e-commerce on the internet, the new British Standard on Information Security Management, as well as legislative measures such as Section 19 of the Financial Services and Markets Bill.

The publishing last month of the Trawler Report by the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) is a 3-year assessment and strategic analysis of internet-based crime and the threats it poses. It makes for sobering reading.

Truly widespread usage has not yet come about. If security is a handful now, says one City of London network integrator, then just imagine the potential for chaos when the internet is as widely used as fax machines or PCs, just because the number of users is so much greater.

Since it first opened its doors just two years ago Hydra has become one of the most successful integrators and network resellers in the City, with a client base that includes Schroders, Saatchi & Saatchi, AOL and Nomura. In order to be able to keep its clients up to speed with the latest developments, Hydra has gathered experts together to give a seminar on network security - the first event of its kind in the UK.

Key speakers are :

Kay Ruddeforth of the BSI - BS 7799 product manager with responsibility for developing and managing 3rd party assessment and training services. She will outline the mechanics of the new standard, its impact on the industry and how it will help improve long-term growth.

Edward Hammond of DecTec Services - is a professional Security Consultant of some ten years standing. He has worked in the international financial sector for a number of years, and is well qualified to discuss in some detail all the high end security issues.

Graham Howton of Cisco Systems - represents one of the industry's foremost manufacturers of network security products. Graham has first hand experience of some of the world's most sophisticated and secure networks, as well as being able to demonstrate how best to achieve effective security and value for money.

The seminar has attracted interest from influential 'City-dwellers' keen to safeguard their own interests, as well as from the NCIS and Police electronic fraud specialists.

"It's reasonable to assume that Internet usage will increase significantly in the coming years," says Hydra MD Mark O'Hara. "As networks play an ever increasing role in correspondence and business affairs, security and privacy will become more of a concern to everyone. We're not even necessarily talking about criminal acts, although organized crime will target the financial markets where the big money circulates. That is why it is from those areas that most of the pressure is coming to tighten up security.

"This is very positive because the clout these big financial institutions can wield is powerful enough to drive regulation, awareness and technological innovation in everyone's interest. It is in Hydra's best interest to get this information across to our market - that is why we are planning this and further seminars to keep our users informed."

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PRESS RELEASE 19-12-97 GOOD CLIENT/INSTALLER COMMUNICATION THE KEY TO HAPPY IT

City-based integrator Hydra Communications has just completed a £160,000 telecomms and data network installation for multinational advertising agency TBWA.

The installation was part of a recent consolidation of three companies within the OmniCom Group, and is intended to link the agency with its sister companies throughout the world and all its clients.

The project took 16 weeks from concept to completion of installation and Hydra project engineers worked closely in collaboration with client. According to TBWA's International IT Director Guy Hanton, this was the single biggest contributor to an effective installation.

A major component of bringing three companies together under one roof was the installation of the UTP Category 5 structured cabling - the backbone of the voice and data system. Everything else would need to fit into this installation to avoid disruptive alterations.

NUTS AND BOLTS

The 170 staff at the London office required voice and data mail throughout the building, via ISDN lines connected to digital telephones and a combination of PCs and Macs.

At the heart of the system are four Cabletron 6000 chassis-based switches to accommodate additional equipment for system expansion and upgrades. The standard 10mb ethernet modules each have 24 fixed ports with two optional slots for fast ethernet or ATM uplink. A further module with six fast ethernet ports allow 100mb and two optional slots allow for fast server or inter-switch connections.

"Any outlet can be used for voice and data - each user having a 10mb switched ethernet port, rather than using a shared ethernet design," explains Mark O'Hara of Hydra. "The increased bandwidth and consequent quick response has made a significant difference in performance when communicating voice and data at this level."

SELECTING THE RIGHT INSTALLER

Hanton knew the product he wanted at the core of his system. He contacted the manufacturer Cabletron - who then recommended the right installer for the job.

This was very important to his appointing the installer and service provider. When the manufacturer of a product he knew and trust endorsed the credentials of a particular company, operating in a very crowded and competitive market, it did a lot for client confidence.

Hanton's IT experience spans over ten years designing, implementing and managing networks for the War Office and the Department of Transport.

"There are three major qualities an integrator must bring to a job like this," explains Guy Hanton. "Their suppliers must have confidence in their track record and performance. The project staff must demonstrate quickly that they're reliable and quick-footed. And they must have a sufficient level of knowledge to allow for easy information exchange at all times."

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CASE STUDY 21-12-98 Schroders

BUSINESS TYPE
Investment Management

BACKGROUND
Schroders needed to bring together a number of sites around London into a single City HQ, Garrard House, while keeping all sites running smoothly for a seamless changeover.

BRIEF
Project manage the integration of an entirely new network infrastructure - from design through installation and maintenance.

CONTRACT VALUE
£ 2,000,000

Schroders put their networking contract out to tender after spending a year doing technical evaluations. The choices were shortlisted down to :
a) a pure ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode)-to-desk solution, or
b) a switched Ethernet/Fast Ethernet-to-desk, and ATM across the MAN (Metropolitan Area Network).

This would include using ATM within each of the site buildings, and then the Cisco fast Ethernet switching solution using ATM between buildings.

Schroders were looking for an integrator who could demonstrate the technical ability to do the job and who would remain in contact. A key part of this was Hydra's experience of working with Cisco. Aside from allowing for good communications between all parties involved, Hydra were able to negotiate a very good deal from the hardware manufacturer.

MAINTAINING THE OLD AND THE NEW
Owing to the fact that two sites needed to be kept fully operational during the staged transfer, a parallel running situation was managed over four consecutive weekends.

At the same time as moving buildings Schroders moved from their existing, relatively low bandwidth network to the ATM Network which provides a much higher bandwidth and higher band resistance.

The four Schroders buildings all had to have the interconnectivity proven and in good working order before they could move the first users to Garrard House. Therefore, the networks were part-installed on all sites, tested and proven before they moved any of the users to the new building. In terms of hardware to be installed, there were a series of catalyst 5500 switches, chassis-based 13 slot devices, extremely resilient and very flexible. There are 16 of these switches spread over 7 floors. Each floor has two of these switched for full resilience and each is interconnected with the computer room where there are 4 more to provide full resilience. Two of these face into the users within the building and two face out to external services.

KEY FACTORS…
As far as the actual network itself was concerned capacity and robustness were most important. There are 900 staff at Garrard House, each with a network connection. Throughout London there are some 2500 positions on the network in total.

A critical part of the design was that there could be no single point of the system which could fail and kill the whole network. It would be required to withstand a good number of multiple failures before the user could actually be unable to access the system. It needed to be built in such a way that entire 'boxes' in the core of the network could be lost and the users would still be able to access the system.

Another critical part of the design was that no more than 48 users could be connected to any one module. This was so that at the edges, where resilience levels are not as high, if anything on the Access LAN were to fail, no more than 48 individual users would ever be lost at a time. If such a failure were to occur, it would require a very simple card swap to bring them back on-line. By using the core / access LAN design the likelihood of data loss is reduced to virtually nil; one might simply lose connectivity and that can be restored within minutes.

Every user who has a PC is connected to the network to access market data feeds, databases, tracking systems and so forth. Whatever they're using comes through the network to the individual user, hence the need for the high resilience.

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING
As Schroders changed their network, they also changed some of their services, therefore a truly direct comparison of speed and performance between the old and the new systems was not straightforward. It was decided right from the outset, therefore, that this would be a benchmark of excellence for them. For this reason they set a measure of speed that was relative to the volume of work and not to the services.

The volume of traffic in the previously structured system was such that the network itself was constituting a bottleneck, owing to the old technology being used. Formerly, the users were using shared Ethernet segments. In the new network each user is using an individual switched 10mb port, so the actual bandwidth coming back to each user is an order of magnitude greater than the old network. This effectively 'moved' most of the bottleneck away from the network to the servers. Now the connections to the servers have been increased to fast Ethernet on virtually all of the servers, and each server has at least 2 connections into the network. Additionally, the servers themselves are now faster.

Hydra probably has more technical wherewithal to do what was required in terms of design work, and also the sheer resources to apply the needed levels of support. Hydra was involved with Cisco right from the design stage. Cisco put together a basic design, but in order to make it work to its maximum, Hydra technicians needed to sit down and apply their unique knowledge of the client's scenario and requirements to refine the system all the way up to the ideal.

Staging was enthusiastically carried out by Hydra, who actually built the Garrard House network in their own staging facilities, spending thousands on fibre patch leads to replicate the Schroder network in their own computer room. Testing and proving throughout meant the client could come and evaluate the design and build as and when required.

MAINTENANCE
Accountability for the ongoing smooth operation of the network is an important factor for Schroders. Therefore, in addition to Hydra 'fronting' the design and meeting specification, a dedicated team is permanently assigned to the Schroders account.

This is one of the most complex installations Hydra has ever undertaken in terms of installation, hardware, project management and stage-testing. Maintenance is a separately tendered contract. Hydra provide the client access to on-site engineers at 4 hours' notice Monday to Friday as well as a certain number of days a year preventative maintenance and ongoing consultation. As opposed to using a percentage of the hardware value Hydra was able to agree a lower special rate for the unique nature of the contract.

"We don't regard the commissioning of the Schroder network as the conclusion of the job, but merely a stage in an ongoing project whose sole aim is to keep the client's network communications fault-free," says Hydra MD Mark O'Hara.

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CASE STUDY 01-02-98 Saatchi & Saatchi, Kevin Corbett

BUSINESS TYPE
Advertising Agency

BACKGROUND
The agency was experiencing chronic failure problems as part of an IT updating process, with the entire network crashing several times a day.

BRIEF
Carry out a system diagnosis to pinpoint faults and propose a system design that would give the company's IT department more time to develop the network potential and less time fire-fighting.

THE PROBLEM
Advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi averted a near mutiny when IT problems had the network crashing up to four times every day.

The company had adopted a new desktop strategy in early 1997, which involved replacing the existing operating system with a totally new software environment. IT management had decided to roll out 30 Pentium machines per month (loaded with Windows 95 and Office 97) as part of a general updating project.

The creative department had already started a move away from the Apple Mac environment to PCs, still using the same applications as before - Quark, Illustrator, Photoshop. This was relatively easy because the creative department in Charlotte Street actually do very little finishing, this being done by a subsidiary.

All went well to begin with, but after three or four months, they started to experience ad hoc crashes throughout the agency. It was in the midst of this that Kevin Corbett arrived as IT Manager.

Hydra came on a very good personal recommendation from the head of IT at Facilities Group - a Saatchi & Saatchi sister company located in an adjoining building. It just so happened that a team from Hydra was working in Facilities Group one weekend when the system failure was reaching a critical point. They were invited to attempt to diagnose the fault.

It transpired that while the old infrastructure at Charlotte Street was quite able to cope with previous bandwidth requirements, the new demands being placed on the system with 30 additional PCs being added each month, was falling over continually. In addition, newly introduced applications such as Groupwise and Novell were more demanding on network resources than those previously used.

During August the entire system comprising some 600 PCs - using both the old and the new network - was crashing three or four times each day. Internally, confidence in the IT function reached an all time low, as both the potential for disaster and stress levels grew.

According to Kevin Corbett, Hydra did a great deal of 'pre-sales' investigative work. At a very stressful time for the agency, the Hydra team were focused closely on putting matters straight, rather than talking price and contracts. Corbett says this approach boosted his confidence greatly.

It was also crucial because by Corbett's own frank appraisal, the IT knowledge within the ad agency was mainly on applications and operating systems. There was relatively limited knowledge of the hardware side of networking, and a network integrator like Hydra could so easily have held the client to ransom.

Hydra recommended the installation of a Cabletron SmartSwitch Router, which fitted in well with the existing Saatchi & Saatchi IT strategy, as and the IT team had previous experience of the Cabletron equipment too.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS…
The next decision the client had to make was whether to choose the quick fix problem to get the agency up and running, or take the long-term option by investing in a solution that would better future-proof the network and give greater opportunity for organic growth.

They chose the second option, fully understanding that they would effectively have to rip out the entire existing system and build again from scratch.

Work was carried out every weekend through September and October. Finding downtime is always difficult in an ad agency where a lot of work is done through the night and at weekends anyway.

Initially a number of stand-alone PCs had to be installed in every department to allow for the day to day running of the company. It was a frustrating time from an IT point of view because all pro-activity effectively stood still while the network was put right.

By the end of October 1997, the system was operable and stable. In its current state - with several additions and enhancements made subsequently, the system was truly complete in January 1998.

"We are reasonably confident that we have put in place an expandable infrastructure that has future-proofed us for at least five years", "says Kevin Corbett. "The primary objective was to install a speedy and robust network that could grow along with whatever opportunities and developments - as yet unknown - that may come along."

HARDWARE
A Cabletron, switched ethernet gives 10Mbps to the desktop PCs and 100Mbps between floors, meaning every user and every printer has a channel going into a larger channel. It could have been done to give 100Mbps to each desktop, but while the requirement isn't there at this time, the new system makes it easily upgradeable. For example, if video-sourcing or video-conferencing becomes more commonplace, it might become a requirement.

The benefits of videoconferencing in this instance are more to do with application-sharing than with visual presentations, for example, but the benefits from application sharing alone make the prospect worthwhile.

On each floor are a number of switches with numerous cards installed, and all these are connected to a main MMAC+ switch in the computer room. This was retained from the old infrastructure, as it was believed to be capable of handling the new one.

WHAT NEXT ?
Now that this job has been done, the IT team can once again concentrate on taking Saatchi & Saatchi forward to greater heights through better use of IT resources. One plan currently underway is to access the TV commercial archive via the network.

Kevin Corbett : "At the moment we have a TV library which is full of VHS video tapes. What we want to do is install an on-line system whereby desktop access is possible to review, for example, what TV commercials we were running for Hewlett Packard in France in 1997. There is no way we would have been able to achieve this using our old infrastructure. Once again, the modularity is key."

There are far-reaching implications for developments like this. From a Creative standpoint, London has always been regarded as being very much a world centre for advertising writers and designers. Similarly with IT, things tend to happen in London's adland before anywhere else. If Corbett's initiatives stand up in Charlotte Street, then they could be adopted by Saatchi & Saatchi companies worldwide.

"I very much enjoy our working relationship with Hydra," comments Kevin Corbett. "I have never been made a hard sell by the company. They rather advise us which route to take to achieve a particular objective, and they haven't put a foot wrong on this score.

LEAVE A MESSAGE
"They're always reachable by phone, and if any on site work is needed they can be here in half an hour. And that to me is the difference between companies who claim they give good service and those who actually do. I know how many companies are out looking for Saatchi &Saatchi business. I can never answer my telephone - it's permanently on voice mail - because I get up to 40 cold calls a day, about 30% of which are from IT-related companies."