SCIENCE

Brocade has announced that the Saudi Arabia based Al-Nahdi Medical Company (NMC), a leading pharmacy retailer in the Middle East and North Africa region, has selected Brocade as its solution provider of a high-performance IP network to connect all of the company's 487 pharmacies to a centralized data center running tier-one applications.

The network, featuring the Brocade BigIron RX-16 and Brocade FastIron WS 624 and 648 switches, supports NMC's voice, data and video needs including its heavily trafficked enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool and other critical business applications, and forms the foundation for the company's future expansion plans.

NMC, established in 1987, specializes in retail and wholesale of cosmetic, medical and pharmaceutical products. The company's pharmacy chain is distributed across the Kingdom and has 1,500 employees.

"NMC is currently undergoing a major business transformation and the company is on a very aggressive growth path. Every month we are opening one or two new pharmacies in the Kingdom and as such we require a robust and scalable network infrastructure across our warehouses and retail outlets that provides scalability and flexibility from a business perspective; cost efficiency, security, reliability and IPv4/ IPv6 compatibility while providing users with 24/7 availability and high application performance," said Mr. Sami Alawfi, chief information officer, NMC. "After a three-month long competitive evaluation process, we found that Brocade scored the highest on all the above mentioned parameters and hence it was a logical choice. I have also had an extremely satisfying experience working with Brocade switches in the past, which further validated our decision."

The implementation was carried out by AGIS, Brocade's local partner in the region. Brocade BigIron RX-16 switches were installed in the core with Brocade FastIron WS624 and WS648 switches deployed at the edge. The infrastructure deployment was seamless and took just four weeks to complete including offline configuration, offline testing, live installation, and monitoring. AGIS also arranged technical training for NMC engineers.

Enumerating the benefits since the network has gone live, Mr. Alawfi said that NMC has seen a significant increase in overall network performance where users feel a perceptible difference in application performance. The number of daily network 'trouble tickets' have decreased due to the stability of the new network and the efforts of network administrators in troubleshooting and isolating network problems have been minimized. NMC has been able to implement and go live with Oracle ERP R12 after installing the new infrastructure. One of the big benefits is that the solution can scale to meet NMC's future demands without the network performance and availability being affected.

Commenting on future technology plans, Mr. Alawfi says that updating NMC's remote branches' network infrastructure is next on the agenda.