Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
The Modern Art of Networking
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Inaugurated in October 1997 and designed by architect Frank Gehry, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, devoted to Modern and Contemporary Art, is both a unique building and remarkable feat of engineering.
The Museum runs down to the waterside of the river Nervion, seeming to slide beneath the Puente de La Salve—one of the main access routes into the city, situated in the Basque region of northern Spain.
Visitors enter from the calle Iparraguirre—one of the main streets bisecting Bilbao—and move down a broad flight of steps into the Museum's heart, the central atrium, where they can immediately appreciate how a building over 50 m high and built on a 32,500 m2 site in the centre of the city can effectively be slotted into the urban landscape without towering over neighbouring buildings.
The Museum offers 11,000 m2 of exhibition space, distributed through 20 galleries. Ten of these, built in limestone blocks, have a classic orthogonal appearance, while the remaining ten comprise huge irregularly shaped interiors covered in titanium. Organised on three levels around the atrium, the galleries are connected by curving walkways suspended from the roof, glass elevators and stair turrets.
The complex external appearance is deceptive: the visitor finds a clear, uncluttered world inside that is simple to navigate and explore.
One critic described the Museum as "a metaphorical city, where the panels of glass that cover the elevator well evoke the scales of fish that leap and spin...the walkways that climb the interior walls are like vertical motorways."
This is the setting for a newly designed network implementation based on Enterasys Networks modular switching equipment, which assures the Museum of a network capable of supporting its most ambitious projects.
The Challenge:
To Deliver a Flexible, Secure and Future-Proof Networking Infrastructure
Like most artistic ventures, behind the scenes at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao there is a dedicated workforce—including approximately 130 users on the Museum's own LAN at the site—supported by business-critical applications, from ticketing to payroll systems. Since the Museum first opened its doors in 1997, the IT demands have grown as they do for any commercial enterprise, and the original LAN was struggling to maintain performance.
The underlying physical infrastructure of Category 5 Unshielded Twisted Pair copper and some Shielded Twisted Pair on the horizontal and multimode fibre in the risers, was sound. It was the LAN devices themselves, based on shared 10 Mbps Ethernet to the desktop and 10/100 Mbps to the servers that had to be upgraded and the underlying network architecture re-evaluated.
Luis Pablo Elvira, the Museum's Associate Director of Information Systems, recalls: "We needed to improve the performance of the network—increasing the available bandwidth, the redundancy and the fault tolerance in the system. We also had to ensure any new network would be flexible enough for our plans to introduce new applications in the future."
Representatives from the Museum's IT staff attended seminars in Bilbao and Madrid—hosted by Siemens Information & Communications Networks, with whom Enterasys has a strategic partnership for convergence networking solutions—that highlighted the Enterasys network architecture and helped the Museum broadly define its needs. Enterasys then proposed various solutions that fitted those requirements, with Siemens acting as the implementation partner.
Elvira says, "The Museum chose Enterasys after a detailed and lengthy examination, involving many conditions and parameters. We studied analysts reports and other third-party evaluations and made a useful visit to an Enterasys reference site that had similar needs to ours. Once the decision was made, we knew that the combination of Enterasys and Siemens was a 'winning ticket.'"
The Solution:
A Highly Adaptable, Resilient and Fully Managed Gigabit Ethernet-Based Core Capable of Supporting Advanced Applications"We were free to decide the most appropriate solution for our needs, irrespective of the other Guggenheim museums around the world—although we are in regular contact with them. Certainly our new network ensures we are have a network that is at least as advanced as any of our peers," explains Elvira.
The network is designed around the concept of "collapsing" the various wiring closets—each supporting a number of users over Category 5 cabling—into a central Gigabit Ethernet switch via the relevant application servers over fibre. At the heart of the network is an Enterasys XPeditionTM 8000 switch routing device, supporting Gigabit Ethernet where the trunk lines converge from the 100 Mbps connections to each server. The network is then distributed to smaller cabinets housing modular, stackable Enterasys Vertical Horizon VH 2402S 24-port switching devices at 10/100 Mbps to the desktop, according to individual user needs.
"The central Enterasys switch can handle the aggregated traffic at wire speed—in other words, there is no latency [delay] or degredation in performance. As the packets travel across the network, they move at the highest speed possible from the cable, with no additional overhead, even where applications are prioritised, continues Elvira. "This level of performance, along with high fault tolerance —covering the power supply, switching matrix and network management module—was a major factor in choosing Enterasys equipment."
Other influencing factors, he explains, include Enterasys Networks' position as a leading networking manufacturer and the partnership of Enterasys with Siemens as a top-level integrator with local technical support: "The result was a complete guarantee, enabling the successful implementation of the project," he adds.
Whereas the vendor of the previous network has since abandoned the product line and its customers, the fact that Enterasys Networks highlights the development roadmap for its portfolio was another significant aspect of the Museum's choice: "Enterasys' support for customers and the clear guidance surrounding the product direction and enhancements, while protecting existing investment in the equipment, helps assure us that we made the right choice. I'm sure in five to seven years, all our products will still be supported by Enterasys," says Elvira.
The Impact
"Since the introduction of the new network, our users have noticed faster transaction response times. At the systems administration level, we see it running at far higher speeds and with greater capacity when transferring information, whether from user to server, server to server or server to user," explains Elvira. In particular, the design department, responsible for graphics-intensive posters, leaflets and a variety of educational materials, benefit from the new infrastructure's increased speed and capacity relaying thousands of Megabytes' data between powerful workstations and the processing and print servers.
Since it is built on an Enterasys Secure Network, the new system is now far more secure against software or hardware failure than was possible with the old network. Inherent in the Enterasys Secure Network architecture, for example, is IEEE 802.1x standard authentication. Enterasys Networks' Chief Technical Officer, John Rose was co-author of that standard, which ensures authentication of the specific user, not just the conventional authentication of the physical device. The Museum network can take full advantage of this greater access security, which alongside Intrusion Detection, is one of many features inherent in an Enterasys Secure Network.
The system is managed by Enterasys' NetSight software, enabling the network to reflect the business and technical needs of its users.
As part of the contract, Museum technicians also attended training courses in Madrid on configuring and running an Enterasys system: "The training was excellent, enabling us to be as self-sufficient as possible," he adds.
The Future:
A Network Ready to Grow with the Commercial and Artistic Needs of the Customer
Among several exciting plans that will enhance the services for visitors to the Museum and staff is video streaming. The many interviews with artists, presentations and conferences taking place throughout the year at the Museum can be recorded, archived and broadcast to students, researchers and employees via the internal network.
The IT department is also aiming to segment the network to create Virtual LANs (VLANs) for specific workgroups of users. The VLANs will enable traffic generated by users within a workgroup to remain discreet from the rest of the network unless meant for users outside that group. "Thanks to the functionality of the Enterasys devices, we will be able to concentrate information according to department, such as accounts and marketing, and so optimise the network. We now have the hardware, the management systems and the training in place for this to occur. Moreover, the network is fully prepared for the transmission not only of data, but also of video and even voice traffic in the future," adds Elvira.