UCC commits to network upgrade

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University College Cork is to provide 14,500 students and staff with high-speed computing services and Internet access as part of a network upgrade.

The third level institution has signed a contract with Enterasys worth €250,000 to overhaul its LAN. The network upgrade will be completed on a phased basis over the next nine months and is part of a €500,000 IT infrastructure investment being made by the College.

The College’s current network backbone is being upgraded from Asynchronous Transfer Mode to Gigabit Ethernet. According to Henry O’Keeffe, head of systems and network engineering at the college, the new infrastructure will allow for expansion over the next five years.

The network design is based around two X-Pedition ER16T high-capacity switch routers in the network core, each with a non-blocking switching fabric of 128Gbit/s and 70 Mpps routing throughput. These feature-rich switches provide multilayer security, application load balancing and traffic prioritisation to meet the heavy demands of e-Learning environments.’

‘Future-proofing was also a key decision-making criterion for us,’ said O’Keeffe. ‘The X-Pedition ER16T is designed to scale but can also handle newer high-capacity technologies such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet.’

The core chassis are connected to six MatrixT E5 wiring closet switches capable of handling bandwidth-intensive applications. The systems have a distributed switching architecture that eliminates any single point of failure and ensures high-availability services for users.

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