Sometimes it’s easy to forget the intricate details involved in managing a network, particularly when that network is the lifeline of a large and diverse university population and a geographically complex campus. Fortunately, Alcatel-Lucent (News 
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Case Study #1: Utrecht University
The value added with this solution was demonstrated in an Alcatel-Lucent case study done on a deployment for Utrecht University. The university wanted to retain its international profile, as well as continue to attract the best and brightest students from the Netherlands. To do so, the institution needed to replace its complete data and telephone network with a wireless network. Alcatel-Lucent stepped in to provide a modern and easily managed wireless network that was both flexible and scalable.
One of the value-adds Alcatel-Lucent was able to bring to the table was the ability to upgrade the network without having to replace existing wireless base stations. Utrecht wanted to incorporate the very latest technical solutions into the network, including an IP address management solution. Alcatel-Lucent demonstrated that it was the first, and perhaps the only, vendor at the time of implementation that could execute against the institution’s requirements. Plus, the solution could be put in place at a competitive price.
Case Study #2: University of Alberta
In another case study, the University of Alberta needed a state-of-the-art solution in the face of the heavy demands its 38,000 students, nearly 11,000 administrative staff and 3,500 faculty members generate, and the prospect of those demands exploding in the near future.
After working with Alcatel-Lucent for more than a decade in addressing complicated network management solutions, members of the university’s Networks Operations team have come to rely heavily on the VitalQIP DNS/DHCP IP Address Management solution. IT has allowed the university to reduce admin costs while increasing manageability, reliability, scalability and security, all within the mission critical network infrastructure.
According to Rafael Figueiredo, the team’s network specialist, “We’ve had VitalQIP for over a decade and it’s an integral part of the portfolio of services that we offer; not having it would cause a significant impact. The system we had prior to VitalQIP was unreliable, convoluted and just didn’t scale.
”While the solution has already demonstrated its worth to the University of Alberta IT team, it gained renewed attention when centralization and a publicly declared intent to become certified ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) took priority. Figueiredo highlighted that VitalQIP is a key component in achieving the key objective of speed and flexibility. The organization also wanted better consistency and reliability to provide clients with first-class service.
Figueiredo continued, “Pursuing ITIL certification is a major undertaking but it rapidly became evident that VitalQIP would play a critical role in helping us achieve compliance. Everything needs to be highly structured and controlled, and VitalQIP helps to bring a greater level of consistency and predictability to all aspects of what we do. ITIL dictates that any given operation is executed in a documented, repeatable manner that is independent of the person carrying out the assignment; with VitalQIP we can enforce the discipline to ensure that every task is always performed consistently across the whole environment."
With the average number of devices that are network-aware being used by students at higher education institutions now standing at roughly 6 per student and expected to grow, the need for a network that can properly manage all of those addresses in both critical and non-trivial. The VitalQIP IP Address Management solution not only accommodates the needs of those current devices under existing addressing in an IPv4 environment, but is also playing an important role in the planning and deployment of the IPv6 deployment phase-in for the university. In fact, the dual stacked IPv4/IPv6 features allow the university to focus on other tasks as the migration to IPv6 is seamlessly completed.
Large universities, by virtue not just of the substantial population of individuals they serve but also because of the technology intensiveness of those users, are certainly the early targets for IP addressing solutions, particularly those than can be used for easy migration from IPv4 to IPv6. That said, other entities with mandates to migrate sooner rather than later such as government agencies under mandates as well as large enterprises, can learn a lot from the two case studies.
Edited by
Peter Bernstein
