United India Insurance Company-MPLS-VPN

They have created a better, more reliable and secure network using MPLS-VPN

to acieve branch office networking and automation. They now look forward to have

core insurance solution.

The MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)-VPN at United India Insurance Co (UIIC)

follows the hub-and-spoke network model-the company's Chennai office, which is

its head office, is the hub and nearly 1,000 other sites are spokes. Each office

is connected to the MPLS cloud through leased lines. At HO and NAPs (network

aggregation points), they have used two links in active-active mode to the BSNL

cloud. The last mile at the head office and the NAPs are optical fiber. The

reliability at branch offices is taken care of by providing ISDN BRI backup to

the leased line last mile.

The network core consists of the data center, which hosts all the business as

well as productivity applications such as messaging and voice. This is connected

to the WAN core, which is on the BSNL MPLS network on high-speed optical WAN

links. UIIC has partnered BSNL for MPLS. The distribution layer consists of the

NAPs, which are the main aggregations points for the branches located in that

city or region. These locations have been connected to the MPLS WAN on redundant

load balanced high-speed WAN links provisioned on optical fiber circuits to

ensure necessary uptime and scalability. The access layer comprises all the

branches and their associated LANs, which provide users access to the

applications hosted at the datacenter.

	Project Specs Business problem: Needed a robust network infrastructure for centralization of branch office date IT solution: Using the MPLS cloud of BSNL, they have created a VPN Impact: The system has improved the service level significantly. Implementation partner: BSNL, HCL Comnet
B Rajaram, Manager-IT, UIIC

The branches will connect either to the MPLS PoP directly or to the aggregation locations on 64 Kbps. The choice of

termination for the branches is decided based on their distance from the nearest

NAP. Delivering the network to the remote branches was a big challenge, but UIIC

has been able to do it in time. The implementation was divided into three

overlapping phases- head office and NAPs (four months from placement of PO), A/B

class cities (five months), and the remaining branches (seven months). After

connecting the head office and NAPs, the core team trained people there to carry

on the networking in their respective regions. Once an office gets connected,

it's given an IP phone to facilitate communications regarding IP migrations and

other issues. Monitoring, management, and security was done by HCL Comnet.