Poste Italiane – Best Corporate IP Network of the Year

The Company
In addition to providing core postal services, Poste Italiane Group offers integrated products, as well as communication, logistic and financial services all over Italy. The ability to manage complex outsourcing processes enables the Group to fulfil customer needs in the retail, business and public administration segments, in compliance with certified quality monitoring standards and in line with the other leading European players.

Thanks to its robust communication, logistic and IT networks, the Group offers a wide range of postal products, from express mail services to a broad selection of financial products. Poste Italiane's products and services can be customised or integrated to meet the requirements of all customer categories.

The Poste Italiane Group includes: the SDA Group which provides express mail and logistics; Mototaxi city bike couriers; Postecom managing Internet services; PosteVita and BancoPosta Fondi offering life insurance and investment solution and Postel, the European leader for hybrid electronic mail and document processing.

The Project
The project is part of a transition project Poste Italiane is currently involved with. They are changing the services from the standard core business to a new entity – one that is able to secure revenue from financial services as well as merchandise.

As one of the oldest consolidated services in the world Poste recognise that to keep pace with customers ever more sophisticated needs, Post Offices must supply advanced services covering financial, merchandise and email. At the same time they expect to be more efficient and productive.

The ICT Plus project resulted from Poste making a decision to provide connectivity services from three main sites in Rome, Milan and Bari to 14000 branches. Traffic is now aggregated on 5 POP interconnected by FO trunks. These POS host the data-centre.

The project was implemented in the following sub-projects:
LAN switching project in Datacenter
Storage project for Datacanter
WAN infrastructure project
Backbone in Packet over SDH technology
Rome MAN in DWDM technology
Access infrastructure for MPLS network service
Content Delivery Network

Innovative use of Technology
The project contained almost all of Cisco’s Core and Advanced technology products.

The mix of different advanced technologies deployed in compliance with the Cisco SONA framework was the enabler to new services that Poste is now able to bring to its users.

The project implementation will, in addition, have an impact on the quality of some key public services provided to society, including the services provided for government agencies such as passport renewals, pensions, and various permits as well as banking and financial services.

Poste office is available even in the smallest Italian village The population benefits from several new services, just by visiting the same office where they previously received standard mailing operations.

Functionality and Features
The services and technologies implemented were as follows:

Data Center Virtualization (VRF, VFW, Server Load Balancing, VLAN and VSAN)
SAN Extension (FCIP and FC/ESCON over DWDM)
Optical Internetworking (POS and IP over DWDM)
Traffic Management (Service Control Engine)
Data Replication and mirroring (SRDF/S e SRDF/A)
Business Continuity (GSLB and IGB Fast Convergence)
Content Delivery and caching (ACNS)
Video Streaming (ACNS and WMP Technology)
The architecture is entirely based on the following Cisco product families:

Core Architecture:

Routing and Switching with CISCO76xx, C65xx and C3750 family for datacenter access layer, internet and extranet modules.
Service Control Engines for traffic shaping in the intranet module
Firewall and IDS blades, VPN Concentrator and Cisco Clean Access for Security
ONS 15530 in Disaster Recovery DWDM infrastructure for optical metro ring.
MDS 9506 for SAN extension
Access Architecture:

WAE-511 for 500 branches
Cisco IP Communication solution for 500 lines.
CISCO2821, 2811 and CISCO1841 for branches
Functionalities by macro-area:

WAN

HA – systems availability (NSF and SSO)
HA – network availability (IGP Fast Convergence)
IP over SDH (POS)
Traffic management and shaping (SCE)
MAN

DWDM ITU grid
User interface FICON, ESCON and FC
MUXSPONDER 10GE
Data Center

Service Module (FWSM, CSM/ACE, NAM..)
VRF
VFW
SLB
Private VLAN
Multi HSRP
SAN

VSAN
FC over IP
FC over DWDM
Compression
Successful implementation – successful business
As a strong, well-known brand in the Italian market the more reliable and secure corporate network has allowed Poste to improve on their perception to end-users.

Acting in a more effective and reliable way has improved confidence and boosted sales. This has proved to be a fundamental step. Employees now have to deal with financial services and merchandise and as such the need to be assisted by a reliable and secure network is essential.

Poste’s key business drivers were; business responsiveness affecting their 14000 branches; compliance with Basel II Risk Mitigation standards; cost control and an overall increase in productivity; transition to a more modern and innovative service for the benefit of their customers.

With the advanced IP corporate network as a foundation Poste can now reach new productivity targets. Being able to deploy new services at a much faster level increases employee productivity facilitating up-selling and cross-selling and opening up new markets such as financial products.

10 Poste Datacenter sites were consolidated down to 5 and this had a major impact on the cost of maintenance and management. Additionally Poste will benefit from new revenue generation opportunities bought about by the faster and more effective deployment of new applications in their remote branches.

Operations Excellence, scalability, and replicability.
The new corporate network was planned and then implemented to account for the scalability requirements of Poste. One of the best examples of this is the level of services that they will be in a position to deploy in the future.

Each solution has been implemented on the basis of two main architectural principals – hierarchical network and service – and virtualisation.

The service architectures for applications and the network were designed with a multilayer and ‘virtual silos’ perspective. Each service is provided by the allocation of resources and functions within the network infrastructure making the network project replicable.

Impressing the judges…..
A different approach to providing services and the sheer complexity and size of this project impressed the judges. The company has changed its way of working and demonstrated real ambition. It has delivered new services to its customers through the implementation of leading edge technologies on a huge scale and this has not only had a major social impact but also changed the way in which the company operates.