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Production at Daikin is highly dependent on ICT. Without a network, the factory would immediately come to a standstill. That is why Daikin asked Belgacom to implement a new, completely redundant network topology that guarantees the high availability of the ICT environment.

In recent decades, Daikin Europe has made a name for itself as a manufacturer of climate control systems. Daikin air conditioners regulate temperature, humidity, air purification and circulation. Since the 1970s, the Japanese company’s European headquarters has been located in Ostend. It is not only an important production site and main sales office; Daikin also organizes the entire European ICT support from the seaside resort city. In Ostend, the company uses a Local Area Network that Belgacom developed there based on Cisco equipment. The network links a fleet of one thousand PCs and printers as well as two datacenters with a hundred servers.

“We are highly dependent on the network”, points out Geert Monserez, department manager IT Planning & infrastructure at Daikin Europe. “There have been a couple of incidents in the past, when the entire network went down. If production grinds to a halt for an hour or two, it costs the company a pile of money. This is lost turnover that can’t be made up for later.” Since the chief components of the LAN at Daikin were reaching the end of their life cycle, it was high time to thoroughly review the concept of the network. Geert Monserez: “We wanted a LAN with greater availability. What’s more, we wanted a different network structure. The new LAN had to be capable of limiting the impact of an incident in terms of scale and duration.” That meant the installation of a lot of extra wiring on company grounds. In addition to the network implementation, the LAN service contract with Belgacom was also updated in light of the new investments.

Redundant all the way

Daikin called upon the services of Getronics to design a new network concept. The company proposed replacing the ring network with a pure ethernet star topology with three separate layers, whereby the whole thing is redundantly constructed throughout the layers. That ensures that between point A and point B, there is always more than one possible way along the network. It is an approach that prevents a single interruption from instantly disrupting a large part of the network. Belgacom provided the implementation. “In certain places, the network’s capacity has been multiplied ten-fold,” says Geert Monserez. “The number of network ports was also increased by approximately thirty percent. The greatest advantage however is that the entire network has now been constructed redundantly.

No change in cost

The new network provides a physical separation between the LAN for the production environment, the one for the datacenter and the one for the office environment.  What is also important is that at Daikin - despite the improvements made on all fronts- the total cost of ownership for the LAN has remained at the previous level. Daikin should be able to make use of the new network topology for at least a good ten years. The current network implementation has a lifecycle expectancy of from five to ten years. Geert Monserez: “This was one of the largest and most critical infrastructure projects we’ve carried out. We planned the project very strictly together with Belgacom, and then made the switch to the new network during a brief holiday period.” The monitoring, maintenance and the servicedesk are contracted out to Belgacom

Company profile

Daikin Europe in Ostend is the sales and production headquarters for Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In Ostend, the company has a production site measuring 150,000 square meters.

Benefits

-     a completely redundant LAN-infrastructure minimizes the duration and extent of network incidents

-     increased capacity for new applications and technologies
-     monitoring and management of the LAN was outsourced to Belgacom, with separate SLAs for the business-critical production-LAN
-     total cost of ownership unchanged

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