The Sunland Group is one of the pre-eminent hotel and residential developers in Australia and is responsible for building some of the most innovative and recognisable buildings in Australia. A publicly listed company of the ASX (code: SDG), Sunland has designed and built Australian icons such as Palazzo Versace, Q1 (the world's tallest residential building) and the Circle on Cavill precinct.

Customer Need

To enhance business productivity Sunland needed a stable, high-performance wide area network for users in Surfers Paradise, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne to share files and to run real-time business applications remotely from each office and users.

Our Solution

GCB delivered a hybrid Ethernet and wireless secure private network (SPN) to Sunland. Access at each office was 4Mb or greater with dedicated interstate bandwidth between each office location. The centralised Internet gateway is secured with a head end firewall and services are easily monitored with GCOMM’s Netview and NetFlow traffic analyser services.

All of Sunland’s Cisco routers are managed by GCOMM with advanced replacement and alerting services on all CPE. Sunland receives additional financial benefits from free phone calls via trunking VOIP calls between the offices and has peace of mind with all data being backed up offsite to GCOMM’s data centres.

Key benefits to the Sunland Group

A stable, flexible and secure connection for head office and branch locations
One-vendor solution
Redundant network design
Fast Procurement and deployment
Project Managed Implementation from Start to Finish
Improved Internet and LAN access speed for all Internet users
Free intestate calls between offices
Offsite data backups

Interview

Back in April 2008, the Sunland Group had an Internet-based VPN network with firewalls across their offices, in place and working. The network appeared to be not fast enough for the phone system specifications which were causing IP phone calls to drop out intermittently. We were working with the phone system vendor and our research indicated that we should review the WAN.

We created a Structure of Works (SOW) document that detailed the project’s objectives, which was to remove the VPN based network and replace it with an SPN which would provide higher speed, simplified connectivity and resolve the IP trunk drop out problems. I consulted with Brian Dumka, IT Manager for the Sunland Group to outline the requirements for the project.
 
There were issues in a number of areas – Sunland needed simpler network management (visibility), higher speed connectivity (for remote users) and to eliminate the IP trunk drop out problem (clearer calls). By upgrading to an SPN we created seamless connectivity between offices with reduced administration overheads.
 
We had completed many similar projects before for other customers so we were well aware of what needed to be done. We had the structured templates that we had used previously and these were a standard for every project. We adapted those templates for the customer’s environment to suit their specific requirements. We also sourced all possible providers for that solution and as part of the presales design, liaised and worked out the right vendors to achieve the objectives.
 
Logistically there were hurdles to overcome in getting the project completed such as having people available in each city across Australia when the cutover took place. The hurdles were mainly in pre-testing, and then having the resources onsite again to actually have a live cutover. Running the two networks side-by-side for testing and then actually coordinating the cutover across all five sites proved to be the most effective way of ironing out any problems.
 
It all went together smoothly, on time, on budget and on schedule. Immediately they reported that the IP trunk problems were resolved. They have reported that ongoing performance increases have occurred across the entire network. By and large everything went as planned.
 
The main standout benefit for the Sunland Groups operations is now they have an underlying network that works and will support whatever future applications they decide to deploy.
 
They’ve now got enhanced communications capabilities, less travel required, enough data capabilities for a video conferencing solution, centralised back-up solutions, and improved file sharing because they have major architectural design documentation they need to share. They can now do that rapidly. They also get enhanced reporting so they can deliver that to the board and measure us against our service level agreements, which they are happy about.

Contact: Adam