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Dublin Port Tunnel: Network Survey & Upgrade
In July 2008, Ematics were commissioned to conduct a site survey of the network to investigate both the design concept and the current performance and reliability of the whole infrastructure and identify any design and configuration changes that would bring about a more stable network. As the tunnel is fundamental to the city’s traffic management, the tunnel had to remain in operation during the any survey and all associated network upgrade works would need to be meticulously planned installation to ensure zero disruption to the tunnel operations.
Ematics addressed the network instability by removing the legacy switches and the Dual Ring fibre design, replacing each of them with a stack of two Cisco 3750G switches within each specific location, this in turn generated a total of 22 switches within the entire tunnel network, utilising the ‘stackwise’ and ‘etherchannel’ technologies to compress the old dual fibre ring topology into a single ring configuration.

Etherchannel is a method of bundling multiple links into a single logical link to increase link bandwidth such that it does not impact the Rapid Spanning Tree calculation.
StackWise is a Cisco feature that enables multiple switches to act a single logical switch with one switch acting as a master and the rest as slaves. This gives the benefit of easier switch management as the switch stack is managed through a single switch and that coupled with “Etherchannel” greatly simplifies and increases network performance.