Software-defined networking for the municipality of Wettingen

Project background

With over 20,000 inhabitants, Wettingen is the largest municipality in the canton of Aargau. It is made up of 33 administrative areas spread across 12 different sites in Wettingen.

Project requirements & goals

The municipality of Wettingen has been a client of Axians since 2011. In 2019, the municipality decided to implement a new network solution. At that time, Wettingen was operating two networks: a community network and a school network. The old solution was no longer up to date technologically, could not be expanded flexibly, and integrating and setting up new clients (e.g., local trade organisations), services, and sites required a huge amount of effort. The aim was to create a new network environment to fulfil all of these needs and to simplify day-to-day operations.

Implementation

The solution designed by Axians is based on the Extreme Networks Campus Fabric Connect technology. Campus Fabric Connect technology offers an automated, flexible, and secure network. Among the greatest advantages of this solution are the ability to make changes in the network quickly (reduced Time to Service), enhanced stability, high-performance multi-casting, and integrated network management.
The Management Center manages, secures and monitors all the network components. Clients and services are now independent of physical topology. As a result, changes no longer need be made on every individual device in the path and/or on the core switch; instead, changes are made only at the edge of the network.

From a technical perspective, Fabric-based networks have another important feature: They use the successor versions of various protocols that were developed for networks in the past. This entire development narrative resulted in stacked layers of protocols that were unconnected and administrated separately. All these protocols fulfil their function in a general sense. However, they are strongly interdependent, which makes them complex as a body. This often gives rise to misconfigurations, instability, and the resultant costs. This solution, therefore, uses a single protocol – Shortest Path Bridging (SPB), standardised as IEEE 802.1aq.

The conversion of the core network was carried out in two steps and was very well arranged by our partner, Axians. It all went perfectly.”

Project findings

Using the Fabric concept, we can now respond flexibly and quickly to new demands on the network environment,”

said the Wettingen municipal authorities, reflecting on the newly implemented solution.

Through its new network solution, the municipality of Wettingen is benefiting from state-of-the-art architecture that gives the relevant people the ability to provide services quickly, separate different clients securely, and automate recurring tasks, around the clock. Constant monitoring of components, centralised logging of events, and automation allow any network issues to be proactively identified and resolved.

Further advantages of the solution:

• Increased productivity in the operations team (automation speeds up Time to Service. Bottom line: Higher productivity and lower costs)
• Better network performance (the key is to optimise routing, reducing response times and regulating bandwidth distribution)
• Better reliability and robustness (all services, as well as moves/adds/changes and other reconfigurations are provisioned only at the edge of the network, leaving the core of the network untouched.)
• Enhanced security
• Scalability (>16 million service IDs available)