To meet the expectations of its fast-growing Generation Y student enrolment, Malaysia’s KDU University College has deployed a highly automated, flexible, and scalable network from Brocade at its new 10-acre campus in the Klang Valley suburb of Glenmarie.
The network is designed for reliable 24x7 cloud service access, whether from the university college’s private cloud data center or public cloud service providers, enabling students and staff to get online from anywhere on the campus while minimizing the university college’s operational overhead.
KDU University College’s state-of-the art green campus currently hosts around 3,200 student and 300 staff, with student headcount due to rise in the 2016/2017 academic year. With a greenfield site as its starting point for the campus development, the university college was keen to avoid deploying over-engineered, overly complex, and costly networking infrastructure. Instead, it selected the Brocade ICX family of stackable switches, which provide a simplified, flexible foundation for the campus network that the university can easily adapt and expand over time.
“The ability to mix and match switches at both the access and aggregation layers of the architecture is one way Brocade has helped our IT organization easily scale our campus LAN at KDU. This means we can add ports as needed, without adding new management complexity,” said Yong Chee Seng, Senior Information Systems Manager, KDU University College. “Being able to manage the entire campus as one logical chassis with Brocade Network Advisor management software means that advanced switching features and services can also be propagated to all switches in the stack.”
Within the new campus stacks Brocade ICX 6610 and ICX 6450 switches have been deployed across nine different switch rooms, with performance and availability assured with multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 40 GbE inter-switch stacking links.
Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) capabilities support wireless network access points, IP telephones, and IP video cameras across the campus. In addition, the whole infrastructure is integrated with Brocade HyperEdge Architecture so that it can be managed as a single intelligent device.
Unified end-to-end management and automation also extends to the campus WiFi system from Aruba Networks, which works closely with Brocade on technology integration to combine two best-of-breed architectures.
“KDU University College’s students expect to be able to connect up to the campus network, stream video, and make use of other latency-sensitive applications on their mobile devices,” said Beni Sia, regional director for South East Asia, Brocade. “When thousands of students are doing that, it puts a huge load on a university campus network. But the KDU infrastructure is up to the task as the more Brocade ICX switches are in a stack, the greater the resilience and backplane performance. From the university college’s operations perspective, scaling the network by adding more Brocade ICX switches makes no difference, because they are auto-configured under the HyperEdge Architecture.”
According to KDU’s IT team, the university college has been able to comfortably achieve its 99.5 percent service level target with the Brocade campus network. It is also enjoying a 50 percent gain in staff productivity compared with network operations at its former campus, as a result of infrastructure and management simplification using the HyperEdge Architecture and Brocade Network Advisor management software.