UL Chooses Reliable, Stable Network from HP
HP TS Consulting sets the stage for ubiquitous HP Networking solution
“With the HP Networking solution, we are operating from a rock-solid
bastion, and that allows us to spend our time and energy doing the things
that are most important: delivering services to our customers.”
—Christian Anschuetz, Senior Vice President and CIO, UL
HP customer
case study
Leveraging the deep
expertise of HP
Technology Services
(TS) Consulting, UL
has implemented a
comprehensive HP
Networking solution to support its
aggressive business
goals and strong
customer focus.
Industry
Product safety
certification and
compliance
Objective
Design and implement a stable, reliable network to
support unified communications and collaboration at UL
Approach
Leverage the expertise of HP TS Consulting to put in
place a scalable, comprehensive, and cost-effective
HP Networking solution
Technology improvements
• Unified communications and collaboration across the
enterprise make UL employees feel more connected to
the company, no matter where they are
• Standards-based network makes it possible to connect
products from multiple vendors (i.e., no vendor lock-in)
• Centralized management of the network streamlines
operations and improves efficiency
• Ability to monitor traffic from a single site makes it
possible to quickly identify and address issues in the
network
Business outcomes
• Rock-solid HP network helps ensure UL can deliver
high-quality services to its customers without
interruption
• HP Networking solution delivers same or better
performance than previous network at a much lower
cost, enabling strategic redirection of resources
• Eco-friendly network infrastructure provides
opportunities to reduce power consumption in multiple
locations
• Scalability and flexibility of the HP Networking solution
ensure a “future proof” network for UL
For more than a century, UL has been making the
world safer by testing products to specific standards,
documenting the results, and monitoring manufacturers’
ongoing compliance through regular audits. Today, UL
features an expanded line of services, such as workforce
safety training and product sustainability certification,
as well as an expanded global presence, servicing more
than 60,000 clients in 103 countries that put the wellknown UL mark on some 23 billion products.
An enterprise of this scope and importance needs
a failsafe network in order to ensure effective
communications with internal colleagues and external
customers. Based on extensive analysis—and following
a strategy, design, and roll-out plan developed in
close collaboration with HP Technology Services (TS)
Consulting—UL selected a broad-based solution from
HP Networking. “UL can’t be down, because what we do
is too important,” explains senior vice president and CIO
Christian Anschuetz. “That’s why we run on a network we
can count on to ensure our work continues uninterrupted:
HP networks.”
Laying the foundation
The solution
UL’s initial engagement with HP three years ago had
nothing to do with specific products; the company
needed to start with a thorough assessment of its
existing network. “The effort was aimed at laying the
foundation of technology and building it up for the next
level of our business,” says Tom Boxrud, UL’s global
IT director. “We saw this as a great way to create a
universal business environment—to really drive unified
communications and collaboration capabilities that
would help the business evolve.”
The Virtual Workplace initiative streamlined IT
management, integrated communications, and greatly
enhanced employee-customer collaboration. Based on
the success of that project, UL’s HP Networking solution
today spans the enterprise, from powerful HP 12500
routing switches at the core to HP 3500 Power over
Ethernet (PoE) switches at the edge. “We put HP not just
in the closets, not just at the edge, but at the very core of
our business,” says Anschuetz. “We did that because of
HP Networking’s ability to scale and meet our demand.
The cost-effectiveness of the solution was also a major
factor; we are spending less on our network equipment
now, with no degradation in performance. That allows
me to redirect resources to something that’s going
to help propel this company forward.” UL also uses
HP EVA storage and HP ProLiant DL-series servers in
its environment.
UL had disparate systems in a number of different
locations, due in large part to many mergers and
acquisitions. Supporting that environment presented
significant challenges from a technology perspective. UL
understood that standardizing the network would result
in much easier and more effective management overall.
With the assessment complete, attention turned to
budgeting, strategy, and the roadmap for UL’s internal
unified communications project, “Virtual Workplace,”
and then to the implementation itself. “HP TS Consulting
basically held our hand through that process,” says
Kent Walker, director enterprise infrastructure at UL.
“They oversaw everything from setting the stage for
procurement to asset tracking, staging and deployment,
site readiness leading up to the cutover, the order in
which sites would be brought up, and much more. I don’t
know if I have enough fingers, but I could probably count
off the names of a lot of rock stars that HP brought in to
handhold us through this.”
HP TS Consulting also coordinated all the key players
involved, including AT&T, Avaya, and Microsoft®.
And because UL was changing the standard from
a component standpoint—moving from Cisco to
HP Networking gear—their subject matter expertise was
critical to the success of the project.
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The network—including products from vendors other
than HP—is centrally monitored and controlled by
the HP Integrated Management Center (IMC). Prior to
implementing IMC, UL did not have a unified network
management toolset. Now, IMC helps them oversee all
the different components; for example, they can look at
the supervisory reporting on various devices across the
globe. The company is also starting to investigate the
use of IMC in the wireless arena.
IMC enables rapid change in the network. “We were
looking for a holistic approach to managing all these
remote devices, as well as our edge and network closet
devices,” says Boxrud. “With IMC, we can implement
global changes from a single source, without touching
each individual device.”
UL is dedicated to providing uninterrupted quality
and valuable services to its customers, and a highly
available network is critical to meeting this goal. The
secret to HP network reliability is a piece of technology
About UL:
UL is a global independent
safety science company
offering expertise
across five key strategic
businesses: Product
Safety, Environment,
Life & Health, Knowledge
Services, and Verification
Services.
from HP’s 3Com acquisition called Intelligent Resilient
Framework (IRF). IRF essentially enables two devices
to talk together and become logically one. If UL were to
have a failure in one device, IRF would ensure failover to
the other one; it also helps share the load across the two
devices. UL runs in high-availability mode at all businesscritical sites, and there has been no business impact
caused by a network outage in the nearly two years since
the HP Networking solution went into production.
Voice over IP (VoIP) rides on UL’s HP network. The
telephone headsets are from Avaya; but here again, HP is
making inroads. “I don’t think HP is known for making
phones, but they actually do have a phone set, and
we are piloting a few of them right now,” says Walker.
“These are capable, cutting-edge, Session Initiation
Protocol (SIP)-enabled phones that integrate with the
Microsoft Lync product. They did not exist when we were
implementing the network, but we’re trying them out
now. So far, the response has been positive.”
Partnership power
Microsoft has been a key partner throughout UL’s Virtual
Workplace project, providing “chat” capability from a
typical desktop user standpoint, as well as the new Lync
product. UL also used Microsoft as a partner in their
Office 365 deployment. HP TS Consulting helped with the
entire migration and deployment.
From start to finish, the Virtual Workplace
implementation has been a collaborative effort. UL’s
technical staff partnered closely with the technical
representatives from HP Networking and HP TS
Consulting. They worked together on planning the
architecture and configuration, designing the system,
and then putting it into production. For the core systems,
UL ran a burn-in process for at least three months to
ensure that the team was fully prepared. “When we
actually did cut over, it was flawless,” says Boxrud. “We
didn’t have any issues.”
And then there’s the partnership with the environment,
popularly known as “Green IT.” With the HP Networking
solution, UL can use less power in off-production
periods to reduce its overall power load. As opposed
to the traditional style—100% power, 100% of the
time—UL’s data center is beginning to take advantage
of these capabilities in the HP network architecture. In
a separate initiative related to UL’s Power over Ethernet
deployment, the phone devices no longer require
additional power; this helps UL to be “green” outside the
data center, as well.
Cost-effective and flexible
The cost-effectiveness of the HP Networking solution is
an important benefit for UL. From the standpoint of both
capital investment and ongoing network support costs,
UL can do much more for the same amount of money
than with the previous network. Says Anschuetz: “We are
now capable, as an organization, of delivering a worldclass network supporting a very diverse business across
the whole of this global enterprise. And we are able
to do it at the same price and cost that we had before
implementing the HP Networking solution.”
In fact, HP strives to ensure that UL’s investment is
“right sized” to the company’s needs. A case in point was
a recent network expansion project, involving a large
number of 10GB line ports for server access. When the
HP Networking team reviewed UL’s proposed equipment
list, it became clear that a smaller investment would be
sufficient. Says Walker: “We had an initiative to bring a
large server base into the data center, and we needed
some serious horsepower. Our initial stab at it was going
to be pretty significant. With HP’s help, we basically got a
smaller and much less costly footprint, such that we can
scale incrementally as we need to.”
Future-proof network
Standardization is another key benefit of the solution.
As UL continues to acquire new companies, the need to
integrate different product sets into the infrastructure
presents an ongoing challenge. Says Boxrud: “We
have a large, heterogeneous environment, and we will
always have that environment. It’s critical that we have
infrastructure that will play with all the different types of
solutions. The HP Networking solution is not proprietary,
so it works very well for us in this regard.”
Adds Anschuetz: “This company is invigorated, and we
are going through massive positive change. The network
has to be there to scale with the demands that we put
on it, and it has to be flexible enough—and extensible
enough—that it continues to be there for the business,
wherever and whenever we decide to go there. That, to
me, is a future-proof network.”
UL’s robust network clearly helps the company meet its
high standard of service to external customers. What
doesn’t get as much attention, but is equally critical to
UL’s success, is the impact on UL employees. According
to Anschuetz, UL employees feel more connected now,
because they are more connected. UL has offices all over
the world, performs inspections in 104 countries, and has
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Customer at a
glance
Name: UL
Headquarters:
Northbrook, Illinois
Founded: 1894
Telephone:
847-272-8800
Number of employees:
Approximately 6,000
Annual revenues: More
than $1 billion
URL: www.ul.com
facilities, labs, and markets in many obscure areas. But
no matter where they go, UL employees can connect to
the network. It is completely ubiquitous.
Customer solution
at a glance
There was a time when UL had network issues; but
no longer. Says Anschuetz: “With the HP Networking
solution, we are operating from a rock-solid bastion,
and that allows us to spend our time and energy doing
the things that are most important: delivering services
to our customers.” In other words, UL can focus on
customers rather than trying to figure out how to
manage IT internally.
Primary Applications
• Integrated Management Center (IMC)
In summarizing the value of HP TS Consulting and the
HP Networking solution to UL, Anschuetz is unequivocal:
“We have built a rock-solid platform from which we
continue to propel our business forward. HP was a
huge part of that. I spent a decade in advertising, and
‘puffery’ is part of the game—I get it—but I’m being
completely clear here. It is not puffery, it is fact: Without
the HP Networking platform, we could not focus on the
customer the way we do.”
• Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF)
HP Services
• Global agreements with HP for maintenance and support of
the network gear and server base
• Multiple HP TS Consulting engagements, including:
• Roadmap service
• Complete global Active Directory consolidation
• Design and roll-out of the initial SharePoint architecture
• Migration from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange
• Complete network conversion
• Physical plant wiring
• Complete refresh, upgrade, and consolidation of UL’s
Avaya telephony infrastructure
• Predictive and post-implementation wireless surveys
in Europe and Asia
Primary hardware
• HP 12500 Switch Series (8 slot and 18 slot)
• HP 7500 Switch Series (6 slot and 10 slot)
• HP 8212 zl Switch Series
• HP 5400 Switch Series (6 slot and 12 slot)
• HP 3500 yl Switch Series
• HP MSM WLAN Controller and APs
• HP MSL4048 Tape Library
• HP MSL2048 Tape Library
• HP 4120 IP Phones
• HP 4110 IP Phones
• HP EVA 2400 Storage
• HP ProLiant DL360, DL380p Gen8, and DL580 servers
• HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8 server
Primary software
• HP Systems Insight Manager
Get connected
hp.com/go/getconnected
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omissions contained herein.
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4AA4-4720ENW, Created December 2012