"University Builds For The Future"
Amy K. Larsen
August 03, 1998, Issue: 726
Sometimes you have to spend money to save money. That's the lesson
Widener University learned from the upgrade its IT department undertook to
make the school's network infrastructure ready for the next century.
Two years ago, the Pennsylvania-based teaching college set out to improve its
educational environment by leveraging emerging technology-without increasing
its costs over time. Ultimately, the school wanted to integrate voice, video and
data to offset the physical distance between its three campuses in two states.
"In our needs analysis, we decided we wanted to use more conferencing and
[other multimedia applications] like streaming video, but to do that we had to
build an entirely new infrastructure to support it," said Gary Habermann,
director of technical resources at the university.
Habermann's team got the green light on the project that would update its
infrastructure to give all 7,500 students ready access to the campus network,
whether they were in the classroom, the computer lab or the dorm room. But
the university's IT department was looking for a backbone that also could
fulfill quality-of-service requirements for time-sensitive applications as the
university expanded its multimedia apps.
The technology answer was to construct a fully switched Ethernet/ATM
network. So, Habermann's group wrote a request for proposal and solicited
the top internetworking vendors.
With manageability and support issues near the top of Widener's requirements
list, Habermann was looking for a single vendor to supply a common
architecture that eventually could carry voice, video and data communications.
And his group needed it fast.
"We had a fixed amount of money to work with in our budget, but we had just
about a year to get 5,500 ports connected and to go live with the new
hardware and software," Habermann said.
In the end, 3Com won out over the competition based on the vendor's
commitment to meeting the school's deadlines, the depth of its ATM and
switched Ethernet offerings, and the company's management capabilities.
"You don't want to go out and make an investment like this without something
like RMON [remote monitoring]. Otherwise, you are blind to what is
happening on the network and there is no way you can make sure you are
operating at peak efficiency," Habermann said.
Widener has 3Com's RMON agents and its Transcend management system
monitoring the school's network.
The network uses 24 CoreBuilder 7000 ATM switches to provide 155-Mbps
links to 165 SuperStack II 1000 switches and Fast Ethernet links to 125
SuperStack II Desktop Switches.
Two CoreBuilder 3500 Layer 3 switches handle all the VLAN routing.
Widener is future-proofing its investment by adding to its data center two new
CoreBuilder 9000 switches that will expand its port density and Layer 3
switching, and support OC-12 speeds.
With what Habermann called "incredible" vendor support during design,
testing and deployment, Widener beat its deadline by two weeks. Up and
running since last September, the infrastructure is paying for itself with
reliability, speed, and tangible as well as intangible cost savings, Habermann
said.
"Where we didn't have the bandwidth before to deliver applications, we do
now. And, through consolidation, we are actually saving money," he said.
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