CASE STUDY
Data Processing
100 Gigabit/s – Part of the Process
Brand_Rex provide
ADP with a 21st
Century Network
Infrastructure
Introduction
Automatic Data Processing (ADP)
provides business processing and
cloud-based solutions. Founded in 1949,
ADP’s business model remains much
the same today - providing transactionbased information processing and
services that are mission-critical to a
client’s business. The company now
serves around 620,000 organisations in
more than 125 countries, with over 80
per cent of Fortune 500 companies and
more than 90 Fortune 100 companies
using at least one of ADP’s services.
In 1995 ADP bolstered its European
presence by acquiring GSI - the largest
payroll and human resource services
company in Europe.
New Data Centres
With data processing at the heart of the
business it is imperative that ADPs data
centre facilities are able to take the strain
and this means a network infrastructure
solution that can provide flexibility,
agility, performance and scalability. In
order to guarantee peak performance
across Europe, ADP decided on two
new facilities located in different
countries. In early 2013 work began on
a new data centre in Paris. With two
thousand associates and a production
site located in France, Paris was an
obvious choice for the first centre. For
security reasons it was deemed that the
second data centre should be positioned
in a different European territory and
after researching a number of potential
locations, Barcelona in Spain came
out on top - thanks in no small part
to its established infrastructure and
competitive prices. Work started at the
Spanish site in July 2013.
Requirements
At the Paris site, ADP was hoping
to build the first true 100Gb/s data
centre in France - an ambitious goal
and one that would require a highend network infrastructure as well as a
highly knowledgeable solutions provider.
‘We needed a solution that could
provide the flexibility, scalability and
performance at the new sites in Paris
and Barcelona, said Vincent Trouvé,
Data Centre Manager at ADP’s Paris
facility. “10Gb/s would offer nominal
performance, 40Gb/s would result
in a good performance and 100Gb/s
would allow excellent performance
- therefore it made perfect sense to
choose a 100Gb/s solution that would
fully satisfy our operational needs well
into the future.” Brand-Rex became
involved in the project after being
introduced to ADP by Karim Derdiche,
Data Centres Key Account Manager at
Rexel France. “The choice came down
to Brand-Rex and one other solutions
supplier,” Trouvé continues. “The
other supplier was not able to adapt its
equipment to meet our needs without
causing significant delays, while BrandRex was flexible enough to pr