Australian storage company, Kent Transport Industries Pty Ltd, is set to replace its existing frame-relay network with a metro Ethernet WAN delivering greater scalability, reliability and flexibility for the business.

The four year $800,000 plus contract involves a fully managed router solution and the delivery of one to one uncontested Ethernet services across Kent's entire WAN.

This consists of six regional offices in Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Townsville, Canberra and NT as well as its major Sydney office and head office in Clayton, Melbourne.

Uecomm fibre will be deployed to the two major offices in Melbourne and Sydney, with the regional offices connected via a mixture of SHDSL, ADSL and E1 links, providing the business with an increased bandwidth of 16Mpbs, up from 2Mbps.

According to Kent Transport Industries IT manager, Craig Prestt, the driver to upgrade to an Ethernet WAN was the business benefits that could be achieved with a more reliable, scalable service with greater capacity.

"We were looking for a network infrastructure solution that would provide a higher quality of service across the WAN and that could also support voice, video and data intensive applications," Prestt said.

"Our existing frame-relay network simply didn't offer these benefits. Network additions were slow and costly and the capacity didn't allow us to take advantage of newer bandwidth-hungry applications.

"Put simply, the Uecomm WAN has provided greater capacity and resilience at a lower cost - both now and for future upgrades."

With regional warehouses across Australia and its business constantly 'on the move', Kent Transport Industries requires 'live' access to its database to book and track jobs online, as well as to manage storage capacity and movements in its warehouses.

With this is mind, Uecomm's solution will provide greater resilience by connecting the head office in Clayton with two different points-of-presence as well as a network design to allow a seamless failover at the head office in case of disaster.

Kent also has plans to make its Sydney office a redundant site for its head office, allowing for greater resiliency and also the ability to transfer more data between sites.

As a result, the Uecomm design includes installing fibre and an Internet VLAN which helps to separate the Internet and applications traffic at layer two.

The increased bandwidth from the Uecomm solution will allow Kent to progress with its plans to implement a records management system, enabling the business to transfer its hard copy documents to electronic copies, reducing the paper trail and streamlining record keeping and accessing of data.

The new CRM program and storage area network application will consist of more than 8,000 file transfers per day, which requires fast and reliable access across the entire WAN.