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Case Study: Cadena SER

Stonesoft StoneGate cluster shields the communications of Cadena SER’s radio network

Reliable communications are crucial to the smooth functioning of Cadena SER radio, a network of radio stations grouped under the umbrella of Unión Radio, a business conglomerate owned largely by PRISA, the leading Spanish mass media group (80%), as well as Grupo Godó (20%). Security and constant availability of communications are both vital. For this reason, the radio network has established protection layers that shield their internal communications and employee connections when accessing services including e-mail and other shared applications and files, through a web interface.

Until 2004, Cadena SER’s IT department protected its communications by relying on software based on a proprietary operating system using a third-party high availability mechanism. This system involved a good deal of fragmentation between the various providers’ solutions, which the IT team felt had to be harmonized.

Cadena SER initially resolved its security requirements by installing a firewall to filter all data, however traffic volume eventually reached a point where the growing demand for high availability obliged the network to contract the services of Kabel – a systems integrator with more than 40 employees whose business is entirely focused on medium to large accounts.

Kabel takes the stage

Kabel’s manager, Raúl Moros, quickly established that the most critical issue was to enter a planning phase in order to assess not only the replacement of existing systems providing communications for more than 80 radio stations, but also had to ensure all work could be carried out with minimum interruption to the business. As for project design, the integrator was aided by two station employees who provided information about the company’s communications map relating to different traffic flows, IP routing, potential grouping of networks and services offered to each delegation.

On this basis, Kabel consultants decided to replace the network’s old firewall system with a Stonesoft cluster containing two StoneGate SG- 1000Q devices. They also designed the configuration rules for entirely new security policies.

Kabel worked for a week on the planning phase, while the installation of the cluster and implementation of defined rules took just two days, during which the solution was monitored in order to confirm that everything was working properly.

According to Moros, the implementation of this solution on Intel servers was straightforward: "Both the integration and the rule design process were but a mere reflection of what had been studied previously."

Evolving security requirements

Cadena SER recently centralised all communications through a service offered by Grupo PRISA, which has meant that all protection requirements have changed. Until the summer of 2006, the different radio stations were connected to the Madrid office through individual lines, via VPNs or point-to-point connections. Now they all access the central office via a single point. Migrating to Prisa’s communications network made it even more necessary for Cadena SER to achieve high levels of performance and availability. Because of this, Kabel decided to complete the project by replacing Intel servers with StoneGate appliances.

We’d got to a point where the client needed to modify the network electronics. It now had to support Gigabit environments and the number of PCI slots available on Intel machines had become saturated. However, the chosen Stonesoft appliances offered up to eight Gigabit interfaces, and this capacity also covered midterm growth requirements.

Raúl Moros, Manager, Cadena SER

The replacement process was simple, because the properties of each node were defined immediately through the StoneGate management centre. For this to happen, it was necessary to plan the creation of a VLAN in advance. In Kabel’s experience, high availability demands that the network electronics comply with certain minimum requirements.

In this particular project, such requirements were not an issue, because the installed StoneGate cluster included a packet dispatcher work mode. Through this procedure, one node acts as a wizard and is in charge of distributing the traffic between the rest of the nodes, without having to give consideration to the underlying network electronics. In this way, if the need arises for backup and node recovery tasks, these operations can be carried out easily.

Conclusion

Cadena SER’s new StoneGate solution integrates an operating system developed by Stonesoft which is based on Linux and is preconfigured with all the required applications. In this way, communications management across the network has become much easier, and when it comes to maintenance and updates, the group’s IT department can be guaranteed that there will be no longer be any conflicts with third-party products.

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