A well-known brand and large supermarket chain that has been on the UK high street for 150 years.
The end customer is seeking to differentiate their offer in a highly competitive market, by adopting new technologies which will deliver against the vision of ‘Most Trusted Retailer Where People Love to Work and Shop’.
The Customer Challenge
The end customer had several challenges with regards to network connectivity within their stores. To transform their stores to better support the connectivity requirements of colleagues and customers they engaged Virgin Media O2 to roll out improved wired and wireless infrastructure to their 630 large supermarkets stores.
The new infrastructure must provide better connectivity, particularly wireless, to better support the increasing range of applications and devices in store which use the network.
This range of applications includes internal business-related services, as well as use by customers such as Smart Shop and public Wi-Fi.|
The project is expected to provide the following high-level benefits.
• Improved wireless performance in stores, catering to new technology standards where appropriate.
• Refresh of the end-of-life wired network
• Standardisation of network configuration and deployment within stores
• Zero Touch Provisioning to allow faster store network deployment.
• Cloud based management of the solution to reduce on premise infrastructure requirements.
• Most importantly, retail colleagues & customers suffering poor user experience because of issues with wireless device connectivity.
Technical Challenge and Solution
The primary objective of the project was to deliver a replacement Wireless LAN (WLAN) network that eliminates identified performance and coverage issues.
With over 600+ Superstores across the UK with a wide range of store sizes and building types. There are many commonalities between sites allowing the description of a ‘typical’ store, but each site will be unique and subject to its own survey and Site Installation Document. The challenge involved changing out Cisco switches for Aruba ones and swapping Aruba Access Points whilst maintaining service across the stores and causing minimum disruption to the day-to-day business.
Customer specified requirements:
• The wireless network will need to work consistently with no device dropouts or connectivity problems. Wi-Fi is expected to be an ‘always on’ service that can be relied upon to ‘just work’. Aspiration of full-service availability in event of AP failure (flow down to survey and WLAN design).
• The wireless network will need to support all devices in use by Sainsbury’s today and Sainsbury’s corporate mobile devices.
• To define a set of patching and port standards for tills, Aps, port speeds, colourless ports….
New Aruba Ethernet Switches will be provided for all locations, to provide a new network backbone for all in-store devices and wireless access points. The Aruba 2930M 24 port Ethernet switches will be installed as a network core, using stacking technology for enhanced management and hardware redundancy. Each stack of switches will use dual, redundant uplinks to the network core switches for increased resilience in case of hardware or cabling failure.
ITI deployed the chosen wireless access point for the solution, the Aruba AP-515 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6 standard. As well as meeting latest, proposed wireless network standards the Aruba AP-515 represents a new hardware release with the longest service expected lifespan. The Aruba AP-365 and AP- 367 is deployed used for external areas, depending on survey results. The solution is managed using the Aruba Central cloud-based platform.
These standard designs are common for deployment, modified for variances in size and build of locations. Each site has been independently surveyed before install. The logical configuration of all new Ethernet switches and access points at all locations follow a standard design template defined in Aruba Central.
Project Delivery
ITI provided Virgin Media O2 with a governance role over our contracted scope.
• Project Management
• A lead Senior Engineer to be provided as our technical interface.
• Normal working hours delivery (Monday to Friday)
• All activities were not store operations impacting.
ITI provided Virgin Media O2 with a logistics role.
• Stored the project equipment.
• LAN / WIFI equipment taken to each of the customers sites.
• fibre patch cables taken to site.
The ITI Team:
• completed the assignment of serial number and mac address to each store and added equipment serial number and mac address etc into Aruba Central.
• connected the LAN into Aruba Central via an Aruba core switch to Cisco core switch Ethernet connection on predefined switch ports.
• managed the Aruba switch specification and Bill Of Materials at each site.
• developed a gate checklist that confirmed the pre-requisites and outputs required for each step of the LAN, AP and SITE ready for migration quality gates.
• provided reporting on the failed installations and any remediations required in line with the 10% failure rate.
A typical store deployment consisted of a stacked pair of core switches, with one to four access stacks depending on the size of the store. Access point counts varied based on the size and physical configuration of the store, determined by predictive wireless survey carried out ITI.
Each store had a different number of switches deployed based on the specific requirements identified during the ITI site survey.
The access switches were configured to use colorless ports, such that any device can connect to any port and the network will automatically authenticate the device and configure the correct interface settings. Wireless access points were deployed as part of the solution to replace the existing in-store wireless deployment.
The access points were configured as standard with three SSIDs to accommodate corporate and public Wi-Fi access.
The existing Cisco network in stores needed to be configured by the customer to allow the Aruba switches to be integrated prior to migration. ITI removed the Cisco equipment post migration.
Outcome and Feedback
The outcomes of the service implementation, focused on:
• Improvements in efficiency, productivity, or cost savings.
• Any measurable metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that demonstrate the success.
• Customer feedback and satisfaction.
On completion of the project there are over 2.4 million wireless device connections each week
ITI provided excellent support with warehouse management, stock reporting and distribution to stores, these were clearly reported with Serial numbers and MAC addresses assigned to each store.
Run rate achieved and maintained throughout the roll out even after the COVID delay.
No Health and Safety concerns identified, and teams communicated clearly with store members.
Post installation checks caused pre migration re-visits which could have been avoided if initial visit had configurations correctly completed first time.
ITI installed over:
• 3,000 Aruba switches
• 21,000 Aruba access points
As part of the project over 63,000 wired devices migrated during 5,000 unique store visits, covering surveys, cabling, cutovers and Day 1 support. Over 1.1 million metres of cabling laid, the equivalent distance of a flight from London to Barcelona.
Installation runbook was a key enabler to ensuring that the installation was completed to a high standard and failures reduced in switches and fibres installations by testing and superb stock management.
Excellent collaboration between all the teams to resolve installations issues in a timely manner, e.g. new cabinets, faulty fibres etc.
Feedback from the customer and Virgin Media O2 has been extremely positive with many complements paid to the ITI delivery team.
