The boutique Six Senses Hideaway Yao Noi resort is located on the tropical island of Yao Noi in Thailand. It is one of the six renowned Six Senses resort and spa management and development company’s resorts and is managed by Susan Noonan, an Australian.
In 2008, 3Com finished the installation of an advanced, energy-efficient, end-to-end communications network solution for the Six Senses Hideaway Yao Noi resort. The communications network helps the luxury holiday destination provide high-quality, reliable broadband services to guests and enables seamless connectivity between the resort and the other Six Senses offices and resorts around the world.
Through the use of energy-efficient switches, the network also helps to minimise costs and the environmental impact from the resort’s communications processes.
The objective of the network is to streamline business operations and increase customer satisfaction. The resort needed a networking infrastructure that provides guests and staff with smooth, reliable and secure communications. To tie in with Six Senses’ corporate green philosophy, this network had to use the minimum amount of energy to run.
The system caters for approximately 200 people with applications covering email, point-of-sale management, accounting, inventory management and human resource management.
The goal of the network was to provide a high-quality and reliable communications network for guests and staff that is cost effective to run and easy to manage as well as lowering the overall environmental impact through the use of energy-efficient networking equipment.
3Com was selected to provide the network solution for the Hideaway Yao Noi resort for the value it offered. 3Com’s network was able to meet or exceed all the key requirements at a very competitive price.
Mailiwan Phoothip, IT Manager, and Rawi Wongwhan, Chief Engineer, are charged with the responsibility of deploying and maintaining the network and ensuring the applications keep running.
“Because of the unstable power supply to the island and eight months of wet season, 3Com has supported the network by connecting the main switch to the APC UPS, which ensures continuity of service and IT operation 24 hours a day.
“The resort has private butlers for each guest for the duration of the guest stay. With only Phoothip and Wongwhan supporting the network and applications it is not feasible for these two to connect guests to the internet when they arrive so the butlers have learnt to do this,” said Phoothip.
The system is protected by Fortinet antivirus, uses Cisco IP phones and runs on Sun and Citrix servers.
“The resort has made a conscious decision not to provide Wi-Fi connectivity because of the possibility of radioactivity,” said Phoothip.
3Com supplied the resort with an ethernet solution with looping designation featuring CAT 6 UTP cables. Singlemode fibre-optic cables form the network backbone and the system incorporates LAN and WLAN networks and easily manageable switches to provide broadband internet services for guests and staff at the resort.
At the foundation of the switching platform lies 3Com’s Switch 5500G-EI Gigabit switch that is able to virtualise switches and ports to provide easier management, resilience, flexibility and higher performance. The Switch 4500 PWR delivers power over ethernet (PoE) that is able to power wireless access points and IP devices over the same data cable allowing greater flexibility in placing these devices.
The deployment of the low environment impacting network has resulted in fast and reliable broadband access for guests and staff, and the 3Com switches are 60% more energy efficient than competing products.
“Commitment to the environment is a cornerstone of the Six Senses philosophy and we strive to ensure that all areas of our business are aligned with this concept. The new 3Com solution ensures that our operations continue to operate with minimal impact to the environment while helping us run an excellent communications network, which is essential for the success of our business,” said Noonan.
The resort’s network solution is built on a 10G fibre-optic network but only 1G is utilised now. Six Senses plans to utilise the additional capacity to handle advanced features such as IPTV and CCTV in the future.
“This was a greenfield site and not without its challenges. We are happy with the 3Com support and the 3Com switches. We have been using them for three years and with no real problems,” said Phoothip.
Phoothip and Wongwhan are looking for another IT person to join their team if anyone wants to commit to a life in paradise, albeit a wet paradise.