The Specification for the Northern Ireland Science Park in Belfast didn’t pull any punches.  They had little choice but to face the challenge.  If you are building an Innovation Centre for high-tech companies it had better be innovative.  If you are building a multi--tenant Science Park in a corner of the 180 acre industrial wasteland that was the Harland & Wolf shipyard - and right alongside a large hole in the ground where the Titanic was built – “you need”, says CEO Dr Norman Apsley, “to push the boundaries".

There are plenty of case studies showing corporate managers the benefits of VoIP switches.  But few have addressed the extra challenges of a multi-tenant environment that will be developed to include 11 more buildings, an adjacent regeneration zone and occupants as demanding as a research faculty from a world-class university.

The design solution was created only 20 weeks before construction  work was due for completion.  The first casualty was the copper distribution that had been the default specification – quickly followed by an urgent need for an additional Comms room and a fibre network to each of the independent 2000 sq ft workspaces.

Delivering the benefits of corporate-quality facilities and cost aggregation but still giving occupants a degree of choice and flexibility was a major design challenge.  The requirements included carrier independence for telephony, secure separation between individual tenant LANs, a pre-installed WLAN network for each unit and a secure WLAN for visitors in common areas and meeting rooms.

Every tenant space also needed pre-provided broadband Internet access, secure remote IP access from off-site locations (for voice and data) and flexible (short-notice) options on additional non-contended bandwidth.  During preparation of the RFP the Science Park’s planners considered the scope for routing all voice traffic via a remote IP telecom gateway – a science park without telephone lines – but the final specification included two PRI’s for basic telephony, and a 100Mb/s LAN Extension Service with a secure 2.4GHz wireless back-up for the IP transport to Northern Ireland’s only Tier 1 Internet Gateway, Bytel Ltd.

The competitive tender was won by HP with a solution based on Cisco’s AVVID framework.  Michael Graham, the Science Park’s Director of Corporate Real Estate and Facilities, makes the point that the mission is ‘to transform dreams into commercial reality’.  “Working with HP has been an excellent experience”, he says, “and when you stretch the imagination it rarely goes back to the original shape”.

Configured with no single point of failure, the fault-tolerant infrastructure employs dual Cisco Catalyst 4500 core switches.  The switches support converged Internet solutions and provide the Gigabyte Ethernet backbone that connects 19 logically separate networks serving the Innovation Centre units.  A Cisco Aironet 1200 Access Point connects each unit to a building-wide wireless network secured via a BlueSocket Gateway.

A cluster of HP ProLiant DL380 servers runs the infrastructure applications, which include Cisco CallManager, (the IP telephony system) Cisco Unity ( the unified messaging system) and a third-party metered billing system.

This integrated environment enables users to access voice, video, e-mail or fax services through their preferred IP-enabled clients, from PCs to smart phones.  HP’s solution included Cisco IP phones as well as HP desktop, notebook, iPAQ and Tablet PCs running Cisco IP SoftPhone a voice-over-IP application.

The end result is an advanced business facility that provides the Science Park’s customers with operational flexibility at a fraction of the cost of DIY solutions.  Being largely pre-provided, new occupants can be up and running without delay or additional investment. They can adopt mixed location strategies because it is easy to integrate the services with operations nywhere in the world – assuming the distant location has reasonable broadband access.

For employees who are travelling afar, the softphone capabilities should enable them to make or take their Science Park calls and voicemail from home, distant offices or WiFi hotspots in hotels, airports or cafes.  It has also opened up new markets for the Science Park, well beyond the physical boundaries of the campus and the adjacent Titanic Quarter redevelopment zone.  They expect soon to trial a range of new services from ‘Virtual Science Parks’ to ‘Research Nomads’ – addressing the niche markets and specialisms that play a large part in disparate scientific communities.

It seems a long way from the days when the Titanic and its less well-known but rather more successful sister ships represented the cutting edge of innovative design.  The challenge of turning the legacy of an outmoded Belfast shipyard into a new source of wealth creation has produced a design that puts the place very firmly on the global innovation map. 

It has meant pushing the boundaries both technically and commercially but Northern Ireland, with a relaxed approach to work/life balance, is now also qualifying as a good location for new technology-driven ventures.

This feature was first published in NetworkingPlus magazine, January 2004.