Lightwire Business delivers for Queensland Rail in record time.
On the 17th March 2020, Alison Day, GM Information and Communication Technology at Queensland Rail, was faced with a difficult assignment in response to evolving COVID-19 crisis.
“Queensland Rail has over 7000 staff, and due to the effects of COVID-19 we were in a position where a large number of those people would be forced to work from home for the foreseeable future, with near immediate effect.”
As a result, considerable changes to data flows were going to increase demand on key network nodes and applications. As Alison puts it;
The Response
DXC had the situation in hand and had already engaged with Megaport to ensure they had elastic connectivity to the required data centres, but hit a wall when it came to getting the incumbent IP transit provider to ramp up capacity. Sixty days was the stated lead time, and that wasn’t going to fly.
What was needed, what had to happen, was to have a significant IP transit capacity upgrade completed, tested, and put into production within five days.
The Lightwire Business solution
Lightwire was tasked with setting up a new, geographically redundant active/active transit solution for Queensland Rail in partnership with Megaport and DXC. The timeframe was short, less than one week to test and go live, and it went off without a hitch.
According to Brendan Ritchie, CEO for Lightwire Business, while a difficult assignment, there was no hesitation to commit to the project, “we have a great team and back ourselves to deliver. But it certainly helps that our partners, DXC and Megaport, matched our enthusiasm to step up and deliver during an unprecedented and challenging period.”
Lightwire was asked to join the project on the 23rd March, and early in the morning of the 29th March, the requested services went live. As Alison puts it;
Subsequent testing demonstrated that the active/active resiliency worked as advertised, and the time to deploy was seven weeks faster than the incumbent could commit to delivering. Peter’s team saw that;
If you would like to know more about the services available via Lightwire Business, please reach out via sales@lightwirebusiness.com.
