Gatwick is the world’s most efficient single-runway airport. It handles 46 million passengers a year, up from 33 million in 2010, with almost 1,000 planes landing and taking off each day. For this to work smoothly, process efficiency and uninterrupted communications are crucial.
Understandably, the airport’s network is business critical. “The network is the central nervous system of the airport,” said Abhi Chacko, Head of IT Commercial and Innovation, Gatwick Airport.
With more services dependent on the network, from e-gates to car parking to 4,000 CCTV cameras, resiliency is fundamental. Security is paramount.
The old network provided a limited number of data paths to communicate between its constituent components. Gatwick wanted to simplify this architecture, with a fully meshed design providing vastly more data links and efficiencies, making it much more resilient to disruption. More than this, Corcoran wanted a network on which to build innovation, from an operational and passenger experience perspective. With long-term value in mind, Gatwick wanted to exploit data, mobility and IoT trends.
The airport wanted a solution forklifted in place in record time, with no downtime or instability. With the exception of all but one solution provider, Corcoran was being told such a project would take four years: “We were told we were crazy.” The HPE and Aruba solution was implemented in 18 months by HPE Pointnext.
The new HPE data centre and Aruba Campus Edge and Wi-Fi architecture, enables the airport to take advantage of new, modern technologies for the benefit of all airport users – including more than 250 onsite businesses, airlines, ground service providers, passengers and 30,000 staff. The solution makes the network more resilient, highly available and future-proofs Gatwick’s investment.
Gatwick’s modern network now supports thousands of terabytes/second switching capacity; hundreds of VPN instances for multi-tenant solutions; tens of multicast VPN instances for various applications, provisioning capacity for hundreds of thousands of multicast groups; millions of IPv4 address routing capacity. In addition, it ensures the scalability to cope with future demands with tens of HPE FlexFabric 12900E switches, hundreds of HPE FlexFabric 5930 switches and over 300 stacks of Aruba 2930M Campus Access switches, to support thousands of 1G ports and hundreds of 10G/40G ports. The Aruba Mobile First Architecture covers the site by over 1,500 indoor and outdoor Aruba wireless access points, with the digital edge secured using Aruba ClearPass and the health of the entire wireless estate monitored through Aruba AirWave. Wireless connectivity is extended to all areas of the airport; landside, airside and on the tarmac for ground services and airlines, as well as passengers.
Massive amounts of video and analytical data, amounting to almost 10 petabytes, are recorded from the CCTVs around the airport, managed by nine HPE 3PAR storage systems.
The simplified data centre network architecture, based on the HPE Intelligent Resilient Framework technology, replaces the legacy three-tier design with a flatter topology, all-active links and superior performance.
Strong partnership between Gatwick Airport, Aruba R&D teams, HPE and HPE Pointnext teams ensured the successful execution of one of the most complex transitions, while maintaining continuity of the airport network operations.
The data centre project strategy was to significantly streamline processes to keep things simple, with HPE designing, implementing and installing everything from start to finish. The project was de-risked for Gatwick by providing a proof of concept approach to demonstrate the viability of the solution based on a real Gatwick environment. Thousands of use cases and test scenarios were executed before going live to confirm all aspects of the network design and operation. Once satisfied with the solution capabilities, Gatwick chose the HPE Data Centre Networking architecture and Pointnext team to automate and simplify the complex migration using HPE IP and tools. A dashboard was provided for stakeholders with an audit trail of activities.
Completed within the 18-month target, while the airport remained 100% operational, the project was completed without any downtime or instability. HPE Pointnext will also provide ongoing management of the new network.
By removing bottlenecks and potential single points of failure and by utilising a backbone based on many multiples of 40Gb connections, Gatwick’s new network represents a step change in resilience and performance. The new network has run without a hitch, with almost zero interruptions. For a major airport, in wireless terms, it is a market-leading service.
With tens of thousands of passengers arriving each day, most of them carrying at least one mobile device, the combination of Aruba AirWave and Aruba ClearPass provides simplified performance visibility and security across the wireless network.
“If we’re not careful, it becomes a very congested picture out there,” said Batchelor. “Aruba AirWave gives us great insight into where there are pinch points and we can automatically configure and optimise the network to provide the maximum wireless experience for passengers. Aruba ClearPass allows us to consolidate all access control to the wireless network around a single point.
One of the advantages of using Aruba ClearPass has been the consolidation of the SSIDs around the airport. With a role-based approach, all the businesses can access the same SSID. Once they have been identified and authenticated, they gain access to their specific domain and approved network resources.
“IoT will be an increasingly important element of the airport’s future strategy,” said Corcoran. “It will impact everything from optimised schedules to aircraft turnaround times. Every process that requires human involvement offers an opportunity to automate and innovate.