Tilburg answers tomorrow's communication needs with an IBM and Nortel solution

Enabling superior municipal services

Tilburg, with approximately 200,000 inhabitants, is the sixth largest city in the Netherlands. With a projected population of over 210,000 by the year 2010, the city wanted to insure that citizens could continue to access municipal services conveniently as Tilburg grew. Tilburg had been experiencing bandwidth problems due to an over-stressed local area network (LAN), resulting in unplanned downtime of critical applications; concurrently, Tilburg realized that it needed to upgrade its municipal telephone system to accommodate anticipated growth in service requests.

Tilburg is a unique city in that it operates under the “Tilburg Model,” and has developed what it refers to as a “business-administration style of local government.” Since the mid-1990s, Tilburg has been managed much like a corporation.

This mode of government calls for dependable communica­tions between residents and the various “businesses” of the City of Tilburg. “Within the City of Tilburg there are different departments. My department does all the things that make all the other departments work: IT, communica­tions and personnel administration–we are the internal services department,” explains Hans Lantinga, controller and assistant director, Service Department, City of Tilburg. Hence, Lantinga’s responsibilities in Tilburg’s form of government roughly translate into those areas normally in the purview of a chief information officer (CIO) in a business setting.

Finding a suitable system to support growth
Faced with growing bandwidth needs, Tilburg needed a reliable and scalable LAN to support all Businesses Depart­ment data needs. For the same reason, the city needed to increase the capacity of its SAN (storage area network). The city also needed to upgrade the aging Private Branch Exchange (PBX) telephone system citizens used to access municipal services provided by the Businesses Department. Tilburg decided to implement a converged network, delivering data and VoIP telephony, while also providing the flexibility to meet their future growth requirements.

“The problem we were facing was that our network was not good enough. There were too many disturbances; our citizens were standing in front of our employees and the systems were down,” explains Lantinga.

After issuing an RFP (request for proposal) and conducting an extensive review, the city chose IBM to implement a solution with Nortel equipment. Tilburg was impressed by the IBM and Nortel combined presentation, due to a detailed migration plan which would transparently replace the aging PBX phone system with VoIP telephony, allowing citizens uninterrupted access to services. Further, the IBM and Nortel solution would leverage Tilburg’s previous technology investment through interoperability with existing infrastruc­ture, and pave the way for future flexibility by delivering an open, scalable solution.

“Our biggest problem was not the telephones, but rather the IT part. And we thought it would be clever, from our point of view, just to have one partner for the total project,” Lantinga adds. “IBM was the best at the IT part and project manage­ment. This is why we chose the combined system from IBM and Nortel, with IBM as the single point of contact.”

Information and communication technology drive public service offerings
The IBM and Nortel solution met the city’s requirements concerning redundancy, availability and in-line power in the network switches. The Split Multi-Link Trunking (SMLT) functionality of Nortel's Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 proved to be a critical success factor in terms of network reliability and uptime performance in the 99.999 percent range, attributes which Lantinga explains were crucial concerns for Tilburg. SMLT allows voice and data traffic to be redistributed very quickly in the event of link or switch failure; generally the failure of any one component results in a traffic disruption lasting less than half a second making SMLT very appropriate for Tilburg’s uptime needs.

The VoIP telephony system is based on the Nortel Communi­cation Server 1000, and serves 18 locations ranging from firehouses to swimming pools and City Hall, with more than 2,200 IP telephones. The LAN system is routed through the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 8600, and is based on IBM BladeCenter® servers. The new data center that supports both the phone and data networks is built on IBM System p® and System xTM servers, with the SAN built on IBM BladeCenter servers.

“One of the reasons we wanted a new system was to make it easier to expand, and the SAN helps us do that,” says Lantinga, adding that the ease of adding new Blade servers into the SAN as necessary reduces stress on the system overall.
Lantinga feels that the system improvements resulting from the IBM and Nortel information and communication technol­ogy solution will have an impact on all sectors of Tilburg society, by increasing employee productivity, responsiveness and flexibility. “It’s always good when your systems are working, and we have no downtime. The systems are redundant, so the citizens never have to wait, and our employees can respond to their requests immediately,” explains Lantinga. “Prior to the new system, we had down­time every week or two. Since its implementation, we’ve had no downtime at all.”

As the city constantly reexamines its processes, in order to optimize service delivery, the flexibility that VOiP telephony offers makes it easier to reassign staff as needed. “For the telephony part, it’s easier to relocate employees as they move around the buildings,” explains Lantinga. “It’s much easier to adjust the telephone system now; it’s approximately a 50 percent reduction in costs, primarily in labor savings.”