Rubber Hits the Runway

Ground zero looked bleak. To begin with, when Anantheswaran took over, he didn't even have a team. Neither did the airport have structured cabling, or IP network infrastructure, which meant that everything would have to be started from scratch.

In terms of technology, Anantheswaran was clear of two things: the network he was building must have 99.999 uptime and it had to be created so that it could be used by multiple airlines and their passengers.

The choice of technology partner was an important issue. It came down to two giants: Nortel and Cisco. But as Anantheswaran points out, MIAL found a better fit with Nortel. "We evaluated both Cisco and Nortel," he says, "but we wanted to be a service provider rather than an enterprise, and while both were ok technology-wise, Nortel understood our requirements much better."

It also helped that MIAL got access to Nortel labs, he adds, which helped the airport develop some customizations that were unique to MIAL's requirements. "Whatever [we] did not have, [Nortel was] willing to commit resources, time and money to develop it. So that tomorrow... we can claim that we are the best in the world," remembers Reddy.

The infrastructure that the IT team finally chose uses a Metro Ethernet Network portfolio's Optical Metro 10G DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) fiber-optic backbone, a multi-service platform and Metro Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 platform with Provider Backbone Bridges (PBB) and (Provider Backbone Transport) PBT solutions. The backbone allows 10G Ethernet and storage connectivity, and should significantly reduce the airports capital expenses while simplifying network management and optimization. The PBB/PBT technologies are used to provide VPN and point-to-point Ethernet transport services for the airlines. PBT enables carrier-grade reliability and ease of management with great efficiency and control.

Because of stringent security requirements the IT team at MIAL decided against IP-VPN. "These are not secure enough," says Anantheswaran. "What we are building is a L2 VLAN, which means that even as an airport, even as a provider, I cannot sniff into the network."

Using this, each application and device on MIAL's network is identified, and only these devices can send traffic. This way no one can introduce or remove devices from the network. It's a provision that no customer has yet asked, which shows how far ahead MIAL is.