On-Demand Learning: Wrapping It Up with Security

By Monique Lucey

We’ve come to the end of this series on preparing your network for on-demand learning, and it seems only fitting to wrap up with a discussion on security. Though we’ve mentioned security in every blog, its importance cannot be stressed enough when it comes to higher education offering on-demand learning to on-campus and remote students.

The more widespread usage of on-demand learning becomes, the greater the likellihood you’ll suffer an attack by hackers or have some enterprise vulnerability exposed. This is incredibly dangerous as on-demand learning applications often feature a university’s intellectual property such as course materials, include sensitive student information such as test scores, and are integrated into admissions, faculty management and financial aid systems. To overcome such threats, higher education institutions must put their time and money into not just encrypting data, but protecting overall network access.

Criminals are getting incredibly savvy and can get around encryption. The only way to truly secure your data is to employ a multi-layer approach to securing on-demand learning in wired and wireless environments. While encryption will still be needed, network access control, intrusion prevention and end-to-end monitoring will be key components in avoiding student data leaks.

For comprehensive security, network access control will have to be applied at the user and device levels. As we’ve mentioned in the past few blogs, IT will have to get very specific about policies, detailing who can view what parts of student records in which environments. For instance, IT will not want a professor teaching a distance learning class via another university to be able to access his student’s admissions records. That can be controlled through centralized management tools that control access rights. IT can also set policies that restrict students from streaming or downloading a university’s intellectual property such as lectures from unprotected devices or via unprotected wireless networks. These tools can even enable IT to demand that only devices with a certain level of virus protection can access or view files.

In addition to network access control, higher education institutions will need to be able to monitor, detect and remediate security issues that arise. To do this effectively will require management tools that can automatically gather and analyze log and event information from the hundreds or thousands of devices in the network. These tools must be able to consolidate information from wired and wireless networks into a single view so IT doesn’t have to toggle between individual management windows to find common faults.

Once a vulnerability is identified, the management tools should be able to quarantine the device and either automatically remediate the problem, such as pushing an anti-virus software update, or alert IT so they can address the problem.

Finally, to achieve complete security in an on-demand learning environment, IT must be able to audit and report on activities. If there is no overarching management system, then getting an accurate view of an institution’s security posture for auditors will be nearly impossible. A centralized management platform will enable IT to easily generate targeted reports that speed the auditing process and enable ongoing compliance.

Keeping all of this in mind as on-demand learning rollouts begin or continue will ensure that student records and the university’s content will be properly protected and held safe from malicious activity.

On-Demand Learning: Managing and Securing Wireless Access

By Monique Lucey

One of the most appealing aspects of on-demand learning is that students, faculty, content providers and other participants can access courses and related information at any time from any device. However, this wireless component means that IT managers will have to rely on the management and integrated security capabilities of a unified network access architecture to ensure that this flexible access is secure and bandwidth-efficient.

For instance, many universities want users to be able to access on-demand learning from both on- and off-campus locations. Eventually, the same network access will be used to check test results, financial aid information and other aspects of a student’s record.

IT managers are going to have to ensure that only authorized users can access this sensitive data and that a user’s policy applies whether they’re connected via a wired connection or wirelessly. Therefore, they will need centralized management tools that can identify the request and match it to enterprise-wide role-based policies.

In addition, they’ll have to make sure that the data cannot be accessed via a rogue access point that could jeopardize student privacy. A unified network access architecture integrates sophisticated wired switching and wireless architecture that can seamlessly manage wireless voice, video and data, and  can monitor the environment and alert IT to the emergence of unauthorized access points. IT will then be able to locate and shut down those rogue devices.

As higher education institutions expand their wireless networks in tandem with their on-demand learning application rollout, IT will need management software that can manage wired and wireless switches, routers and other enterprise infrastructure. That way, they can apply patches, software updates and policies with ease to all devices in the network from a single console instead of having to update several unconnected systems. In many cases, they can actually integrate physical WLAN controller modules into switches in order to eliminate unnecessary appliances that consume power and take up valuable physical space.

They’ll also be able to set granular policies that might enable a teacher to access a student’s record within the university’s wireless network, but not from anywhere else. This level of detail is important for state and federal regulations.

Centralized management and a secure network fabric that protects from external and internal threats will also help ensure that wireless devices accessing the network are not carrying root kits, viruses or other malware that users may pick up beyond the university firewall. IT can use network access control to scan all devices for appropriate anti-virus software and other security tools before they interact with student data.

In addition to security, IT can also use integrated network monitoring modules that feed important data and alerts back to the centralized management platform to monitor and manage the amount of traffic in the wireless environment. An access point might work fine with a dozen people logging on to it, but if a whole dormitory floor is trying to work within the on-demand learning application via wireless devices, it could create a serious bottleneck. With the centralized management platform, IT would be alerted as access points hit their threshold so they could add more or set user and device priorities to control traffic.

Finally, wireless can pose challenges when it comes to generating reports on compliance. However, if the management tools can integrate data from the wireless access points and wireless switches with the wired network data, then IT can offer auditors comprehensive reports.

As you see, for on-demand learning to be securely and efficiently extended to wireless networks, IT must deploy intelligent and centralized management tools as well as infrastructure that can handle both wired and wireless voice, video and data.

On-Demand Learning: Out to the Branch Office and the Remote User

By Monique Lucey

The final areas of the enterprise sure to be impacted by on-demand learning are the branch office and the remote user. Both tend to be at a distance from IT, and as a result present different challenges than their campus LAN and data center counterparts.

Let’s begin with the role that the branch office will play in an on-demand learning application rollout, which will be significant. After all, international partners, learning on-demand content producers, off-campus dormitories and satellite campuses are all a type of branch office in higher education. They need to share data with the main network, but have to do so across the WAN.

To ensure the privacy and integrity of data and to comply with government regulations, IT must encrypt data end-to-end and create secure tunnels. This could be difficult without management tools that can recognize and manage routers, switches and other branch infrastructure as well as control access at the user and device level.

IT will require an overarching management system that can apply institutional and regulatory policies to branch office activities surrounding on-demand learning. For instance, a third-party testing firm should be able to input a student’s grade into his record, but not access his financial aid or registration information.  A sophisticated enterprise-wide management tool would be able to deploy, enforce and update centralized policies at the branch level.

In addition, most higher education institutions don’t have a plethora of IT staff to handle branch technical issues. An automated, centralized and – in some cases – virtualized switching environment would help IT support the widespread use of on-demand learning, and its expanded infrastructure, without having to add headcount.

Deploying these services in a multi-service router platform that supports routing, switching, security, voice and wireless replaces discreet devices, conserving valuable power and space.

A consolidated platform that can be pre-configured, shipped and remotely managed also reduces service calls and saves money as well as energy consumption and space in often constrained branch environments.

IT would be able to manage this branch infrastructure using a standard image monitored from a centralized console. Once that gear was up and running, IT could remotely and automatically push updates, patches and other critical maintenance tasks that would otherwise require on-site visits from tech staff.

If systems were somehow corrupted, IT could dial back to a recent, stored image saved to a central repository – again, without having to send out a technician.

Such tools would also provide IT a single view of all branch devices from a central console, enabling concise fault analysis and remediation. These sophisticated management tools make it possible for one person to easily monitor and manage thousands of sites.

The same can be said of the remote user environment. IT could enable users such as faculty, admissions personnel, financial aid workers, third-party testing firms, partner universities and even students themselves to access information within on-demand learning applications without compromising security or privacy.

The centralized management system that controls the data center, campus LAN and branch offices can also be used to set policies for remote user and device access. For instance, IT could set rules that restrict faculty from reading student homework on an unauthorized mobile device. That kind of granularity would ensure the highest level of productivity without risking data leaks.

These management tools would provide incredibly flexibility. Higher education institutions could set up short-term partnerships with other universities and allow their faculty and students access to content from remote locations.

IT could also take advantage of centralized management to ensure that no single user or branch is saturating the network. By monitoring traffic closely, IT could improve capacity planning and budgeting for infrastructure upgrades.

The combination of intelligent management software and intelligent switches would enable IT to easily and cost-effectively handle on-demand learning rollouts to branch offices and remote users.

In the next blog, we’ll dive into strategies for securing one demand learning in the wireless enterprise.

On-Demand Learning: In the Campus LAN

By Monique Lucey

In the last blog, we tackled the challenges – and solutions – in supporting on-demand learning in the data center. Now we’ll do the same for another critical component of the enterprise: the campus LAN.

To understand the obstacles you might face in deploying such applications in the campus LAN, let’s consider the various wired and wireless locations from which students, faculty, university leaders and admissions personnel will try to access data. As an example, think of a large state university. There you’d have users logging into on-demand courses and associated registration information from classrooms, the administration building, the library, clinics, research laboratories, dormitories, student unions and other locations across campus.

In the past in higher education, collaborative applications would start up as skunkworks projects that rode on their own network. However, with on-demand learning being so essential and lucrative for higher education, IT will have to ensure that these networks are more sophisticated and users can securely access lectures, study groups, coursework and admissions information.

Rather than adding a switch here or there to support such applications in a one-off fashion, you’ll have to gain control of myriad networks and apply security and policy at the interconnects, or switches and routers. You’ll also have to do away with complex protocols such as Spanning Tree or Virtual Redundant Routing to tie switches together for higher availability and redundancy. The resource-intensive, real-time nature of on-demand learning makes them intolerable.

Instead, you’ll need a solution that lets you increase redundancy and easily scale your network as more and more campus players come online. You’ll need switches that can automatically “see” each other and fail over to one another in case of an outage or power cut. Your switching network must let you manage all switching resources as a virtual pool through a single console.

Important in this single-pane strategy is the ability to manage and secure your wired and wireless switching networks, including access points, as a unified whole.  Think about a student trying to access a course or chat with their virtual study group wirelessly from a campus library and then his dormitory. You’ll need to automatically control his access as he roams the campus.

To properly oversee your wired and wireless LAN, your switches should be able to apply policy at the user and device levels. For instance, you won’t want someone to be able to hack into records for a student that has signed up for an online class. You also don’t want non-essential traffic, such as student access to the Internet, to hog all of the network bandwidth. Centralized management tools enable you to set and enforce role-based policies campus-wide.

To accommodate a growing number of endpoints, your switches should support Gigabit Ethernet at the edge with 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks to the core and multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet, or higher, capacity in the core. In the not too distant future, you’ll see 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet links between the core and data center as well. A high-capacity switch will let you increase your speed without having to rip and replace your infrastructure.

At the same time as capacity is growing, space for these switches is getting more and more constrained. Therefore, you need a switching environment that can fit into already crowded wiring closets. The switches will have to generate less heat and consume less power. These are both standard requirements for today’s campus LAN.

As interest in on-demand learning grows, so will the number of switches and virtual switches in your environment. But we’ll bet that your budget will not increase to add staff to manage those switches. To ensure that you don’t overtax your staff, your switches will have to be easy to deploy and administer.

You’ll want to be able to create a master image of a switch and automatically apply it to other switches as they come online so you don’t have to use up staff resources configuring and testing each piece of hardware.  You’ll also need to be able to push out updates and patches from a central management console.

Lastly, your campus LAN switching environment will have to have embedded security, including 802.1X authentication and protocols that stop DHCP snooping and other damaging attacks.

With all of these requirements checked off, your campus LAN will be ready to handle the incredible challenge of deploying and managing on-demand learning.

In the next blog, we’ll dig into how on-demand learning will impact the branch office and mobile/remote workers.

On-Demand Learning: In the Data Center

By Monique Lucey

We began our multi-blog discussion about on-demand learning by talking about the urgent need for global deployment. Now we’re going to begin to dig down into the impact of such applications at each point in the enterprise. Nowhere will on-demand learning have a greater impact than in the data center.

To understand the heavy burden the data center will carry in these deployments, you have to think of the ecosystem of players that are involved in on-demand learning. Students, faculty, workplaces, and satellite campuses are among the numerous entities that will be collaborating by sharing data via your on-demand learning system.

Studying this, it becomes clear that you’ll need to accommodate this diversity via policy-based management, tight access controls, support for robust bandwidth and the ability to easily expand your network.

On-demand learning is taking hold quickly and it’s incredibly widespread. Therefore, you’ll need to be able to rapidly scale your data center architecture. Physically-oriented legacy infrastructure is too restrictive, expensive to acquire and costly to maintain to make it a viable choice in the world of on-demand learning.

The best way to handle the on-demand learning revolution is to deploy purpose-built infrastructure that flattens out your architecture and can be easily extended, managed and secured. Included in this approach is a virtualized switching fabric that gives you the reliability and failover you’ll need with on-demand learning. Think about how many students, faculty and university administrators will be dependent upon your data center infrastructure. Application downtime will be intolerable. Without supreme access to your on-demand learning applications, students and instructors could become frustrated and decide to learn or teach elsewhere. That is an incredibly costly repercussion.

With a virtualized switching fabric in the data center, you’re able to weave together all your resources into a single, logical pool. If a failure should occur, redundant infrastructure components and network services can take over with no user impact. You can also easily add switches to the pool. That’s the kind of reliability that you’ll need as on-demand learning takes hold around the world.

You’ll also need the ability to extend your network to new entities, including global universities and new campuses, on the fly. With a resilient network fabric you’ll be able to easily integrate or consolidate an educational partner into your existing network simply by adding a new switch. That switch can be auto-discovered and propagated with your well-tested policies and configurations. This saves an incredible amount of time and effort and reduces the potential for human error.

Another critical aspect of broadening your network is the ability to control device and user access based on policy. The only way to do this effectively is through centralized management tools. These tools allow you to set limitations on how and from where users can access information. You can also granularly manage system-to-system access. For instance, a financial aid worker would not be able to glimpse student grades and students would not be able to look at faculty files. This type of built-in security will help users gain confidence in on-demand learning and ensure compliance with U.S. and global privacy regulations.

There is no doubt that as on-demand learning continues to gain acceptance there will be an enormous amount of data, including large streaming media files, passing through your data center. To avoid bottlenecks, you’ll need infrastructure that can support 10 Gigabit Ethernet and higher. 10 Gigabit Ethernet has the added benefit of enabling you to consolidate your switches and network interface cards, which can lead to a reduced data center footprint as well as lower power and cooling expenses. So despite the fact that you’ll be bringing on a resource-intensive application, you’ll have minimal impact on overall data center resources.

In the next blog, we’ll discuss the impact of on-demand learning on the campus LAN and how you can plan now to handle it with ease.

The Network Demand of Learning on Demand

By Monique Lucey

There seems to be a perfect storm brewing that will increase the need for on-demand learning: an influx of out-of-work education seekers, another looming round of the H1N1 virus, and reductions in faculty.

Combined, these forces are putting pressure on higher education institutions to boost their on-demand – or distance learning – offerings. However, this comes with a Catch-22 for IT teams: they need to support more applications without an increased budget.

A 2009 Babson Survey Research Group report found that more than 4.6 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2008 term – a 17% increase from the previous year. At the same time, 50 percent of institutions saw their budgets decrease due to the economy.

Now, let’s keep something in mind about on-demand learning: it is a multimedia-rich environment that can involve thousands of students from all over the world or right next door clamoring for the same information at the same time.

Consider the impact of a resurgence of the H1N1 virus, which is predicted for this spring. The Babson report says “substituting online classes for face-to-face classes is a component of 67 percent of H1N1 contingency plans.” So you might be used to having a certain number of users accessing your network in a face-to-face learning environment, and all of a sudden, you are going to have to ramp up to support the entire student body accessing data on-campus and remotely with the same infrastructure! If you’re scratching your head, you are not alone.

Here’s another scenario: Unemployment is at an all-time high. As people continue to hit a brick wall in finding work, chances are they are going to want to beef up their education to pass the time and improve their resumes. Many will want to do so via online learning.

Also, depending on your university’s location and the local unemployment rate, your leadership might partner with government to expand course offerings for citizens. Many of these will be offered over the Internet because academic institutions are stretching their faculty resources by moving courses online.

The Babson survey found that 87% of nearly all public institutions say the economic downturn has increased demand for their existing online courses and programs. At the same time, the report says, “virtually all institutions report an increase in demand for financial aid, and about one-half say that the size of the institutional budget has decreased as a result of the economic downturn.”

So where does that leave you? You certainly can’t say no and that it’s too much for the network, and users will start to see application slowdowns and possibly outages. There’s no way you’re going to force your organization to miss out on the revenue that will be generated by these courses. Yet, you know you can’t continue to pile on more users and resource-intensive programs without the infrastructure beginning to buckle.

Over the next few blogs, we’re going to help you strategize how to support this surge in on-demand learning without breaking the bank or breaking your network. We’ll discuss challenges and solutions at all levels, including the data center, campus LAN, satellite campus, and mobile/remote.

You’ll see that rather than crumbling, your network will thrive and, therefore, so will your institution.

Talk Is Not Cheap, It’s Cost-Effective

By John Gray

In the previous blog, we started our discussion about energy efficiency – a key component of the next-generation data center – by addressing the need for real numbers regarding consumption. But just as important as having this information is communicating it to the right people.

Sound familiar? Your university needs to bring in a new admissions system, so the network team specs out the proper hardware based on performance requirements and then has it shipped to the data center. It isn’t until the gear arrives in the data center that the facilities team is aware of the additional power and cooling needs of the new infrastructure. This is despite that fact that the facilities team is most often the team responsible for ensuring that there is enough energy and HVAC to keep the infrastructure going. And it is usually the facilities team that has to account for electric and other utility costs in its budget.

Doesn’t sound very fair, does it? Or very cost efficient? What if that new gear needs just enough power that the electric grid would be considered at capacity? Or what if the HVAC system needed to be upgraded to account for new hardware? Both situations could delay the rollout of your admissions software, and therefore jeopardize student enrollment.

The better strategy is to identify who in the data center and the overall physical plant are responsible for supplying energy and HVAC to the building as well as the entire organization. Establish a virtual energy-efficiency team with these folks so that when you are making hardware purchases, you can run the real-world numbers you’ve gathered by them.

Armed with this information, this “green” team can determine whether the data center has enough energy and HVAC resources to handle any increased demand. If not, you might be able to scale back your plans before users are impacted by delays or poor performance.

This team could also begin to research the Energy Star program and Green Grid tools noted in the previous blog to gain an understanding of the actual consumption within the data center. It may become clear that if you upgrade to newer, more energy-efficient servers and switches, you could extend the life of your existing data center and avoid an expensive expansion.

Together you could also develop guidelines for purchasing and deploying new gear that could speed rollouts. For instance, by having the facilities teams involved at the time of purchase, they could have floor space, power and cooling all mapped out by the time the new equipment arrives.

Most importantly, you’ll be tuned in to any changes in how power and cooling are supplied to the physical plant. For instance, you’ll know if there are plans to make part of the data center run off solar energy or to use more energy-efficient cooling systems. The cost savings from going green might be able to help fund strategic, revenue-generating projects such as new courses and cutting-edge research.

It’s also likely that your superiors will be impressed that you took the initiative and reached out to the facilities teams to save money, streamline business processes, and improve student and faculty satisfaction. In this time of shrinking endowments and tight budgets, that’s a very good thing.

Ga-ga for Green

By John Gray

In this last part of our discussion about evolving to become a next-generation data center, we’re going to tackle the ubiquitous topic of energy efficiency. We know that you’re getting bombarded with questions about how “green” your data center is, and as you seek budget for resource-intensive applications such as real-time distance learning and advanced collaboration, you’ll need real answers.

Deploying these projects in a time of tight budgets, shrinking endowments and limited data center resources (i.e., lack of real estate and power grid resources) will take some strategic planning on your part. Somehow you have to roll out systems that will contribute to the bottom line without sending power and cooling costs into the stratosphere or requiring so much more data center space that you have to build a whole new facility. Both of these approaches negate whatever revenue might be gained from these exciting new projects and are considerably environmentally un-friendly.

Add to this that Nemertes Research says it won’t be long before data centers are maxed out energy-wise. “By the end of 2010, more than 50 percent of large data centers will reach maximum power consumption levels, leaving consumers in a major energy crisis as these organizations will be unable to scale data operations to support their business needs,” says Andreas Antonopoulos, senior vice president at the research advisory firm.

So how can you avoid this outcome? The answer is twofold: Know the real energy consumption your data center infrastructure—including servers and switches—will require, and communicate that information to your data center and physical plant facilities teams.

Let’s start with having real numbers. Antonopoulos warns that the lack of data center resources will mean that “power efficiency and accurate data on power consumption is absolutely vital for the future.”

“To avert this crisis, organizations need to not only measure their own data on power consumption, but also, they need to begin demanding that vendors disclose all product efficiency data in order to serve as a key criterion for customers who are choosing the tools that will best provide them with sustainable next-generation data centers,” he says.

Too often, network teams base their projected power and cooling architectures on vendor data sheets. But these on-paper numbers do not necessarily reflect how the products will perform under the rigors of your specific data center environment. The inevitable discrepancy can present serious problems. If you overprovision resources, you’ll end up spending more than you need and impacting the energy efficiency of your data center. Under-provisioning will leave you scrambling to bring in more power and cooling infrastructure, which can impact network performance, drive up costs and potentially force you to unnecessarily add on to your data center.

What you should be using to gauge the energy impact of network gear on your data center are real-world numbers. This way, you can accurately assess whether you can eke more from your raised-floor data center. Since the cost of a new data center is estimated to start around $20 million, working with real-world power and cooling requirements is essential.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will take a big step in making this possible come June when it plans to extend its Energy Star program to data centers. According to the IDG News Service, the program will offer incentives for organizations to make their data centers more energy efficient and offer tools to track the results of conservation projects over time.

“Data centers that take part will use an online tool that ranks their efficiency on a scale of 1 to 100. Those that score 75 or higher can request an audit from the EPA, which then awards the Energy Star certification,” the article states.

The author points out that the Energy Star program is also recognized in Europe and that China and India have agreed “in principle” to use the EPA’s system to rank products. Andrew Fanara, the program’s lead at the EPA, is quoted as acknowledging that avoiding a patchwork quilt of regional programs is important, especially for multinational companies.

Some vendors have even started certifying the energy efficiency of their own products. For instance, independent testing firm Miercom offers its “Certified Green” program to provide vendors with an objective assessment of the environmental impact and business case effectiveness of their products as compared with national indices.

Organizations hoping to nail down some stats on their energy efficiency today can use the online resources at The Green Grid. There you’ll find a power configuration efficiency estimator, a data center design guide, a presentation on real-time energy consumption measurements in data centers and other valuable tools to help you better understand how to manage your energy demands.

You can also alleviate your concerns about energy efficiency via a flattened architecture, which we’ve discussed in previous posts. By moving from a three-tier strategy to a two-tier one, you can reduce the number of devices and interconnects in your data center consuming floor space as well as power and cooling resources.

Being proactive about energy efficiency ensures that your organization won’t have to choose between spending money on power-hungry network infrastructure that might tap out the grid and force you to construct a new data center facility versus purchasing new research lab equipment that could help find a cure for cancer. You’ll be able to show university administrators that not only are you choosing to be green, but you’re also saving green—money, that is—in the process.

In our next blog, we’ll talk about the second half of the energy discussion: planning power and cooling needs with your data center and physical plant facilities teams.

10G Ethernet: Paving the way to FCoE

(This week we continue our series on the data center.)

By John Gray

If you peer inside the data center of a large higher education institution, you’re bound to see at least three separate fabrics being supported: Ethernet for the LAN, Fibre Channel for the storage area network, and the specialized Infiniband for high-performance computing (HPC). Keeping with our discussion on the characteristics of the next-generation data center, managing three separate fabrics is hardly the path to simplification.

However, it’s understandable why you’re holding onto this type of architecture – to unify, you’d need an underlying network technology that could handle the unique demands of all three environments. Gigabit Ethernet alone is often not robust enough to deal with the I/O requirements of HPC and large-scale SANs. Fibre Channel and Infiniband are expensive technologies that need highly trained staff. In a time of tight budgets, the double whammy of costly hardware and training is not a recipe for success.

Over the next few years, you’ll see the adoption of a unified network fabric based on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as it evolves and becomes more commonplace in network gear. FCoE enables large data centers dealing with tremendous traffic and storage loads to preserve the benefits of Fibre Channel, which has a strong installed base, while taking advantage of the ubiquity of Ethernet deployments and common skill sets.

Although work on the FCoE standard was finalized last year, there are still significant components that need to be completed to ensure the reliability that users have with traditional Fibre Channel. For instance, there are protocols in the works still to deal with congestion notification, enhanced transmission selection and priority-based flow control. All of these are working their way through the IEEE’s standards process.

As you wait for these piece parts to be settled out, it’s important that you start to look at the most critical element of FCoE’s success – 10G Ethernet. For FCoE to be able to handle the load as gracefully as its counterparts, it needs the workhorse that is 10G switching. Think about the I/O you’ll need to handle virtual learning and other multimedia traffic, backup and storage.

The migration to 10G Ethernet in the near term offers you many benefits beyond the future support of FCoE. Since 10G delivers 10 times the bandwidth of Gigabit Ethernet, colleges and universities can reduce the Gigabit Ethernet NICs they need in highly virtualized environments. Rather than use as many as four to eight Gigabit Ethernet NICs in each server, you can deploy just two 10G Ethernet NICs and achieve full redundancy and availability while increasing bandwidth per virtual machine.

Consolidating around 10G, Gigabit Ethernet network I/O also dramatically reduces the number of Gigabit Ethernet ports, upstream switch ports and cables you need to deploy and manage. And it puts you in line with the goal we’ve outlined over the past few blogs – a flatter network architecture. As a bonus, fewer ports and switches lead to reduced power and cooling.  Both of these outcomes are the essence of the next-generation data center.

Managing the Next-Generation Data Center

By John Gray

This week’s blog is Part 3 in the series of data center blogs. In the last blog, we talked about the importance of flattening out your university’s data center architecture from a three-tier to a two-tier model. But that is just one step in simplifying your data center – the other is to deploy a centralized management methodology.

Centralized management is a critical component of a higher education institution’s next-generation data center because it will reduce the complexity of managing this collapsed network you’ve created.

In a recent conversation with Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president at the Yankee Group consultancy in Boston,  he indicated that most colleges and universities don’t have the luxury of owning connectivity end to end. For instance, the dormitories might be run by one group and the academic departments by another. He believes that IT must be able to centrally deliver, manage and secure critical services as a unified whole throughout the enterprise.

Moving away from managing your switches, routers and other network devices individually is essential to boosting the efficiency of your data center. It’s also necessary to cost effectively meet the twin demands of compliance and security.

It’s important that as you look for a centralized management tool, you make sure that it can interoperate with the myriad network and security devices in your data center. Otherwise, you’ll heighten the level of complexity instead of lowering it.

With this tool, you should be able to create a policy and automatically deploy it to the entire enterprise. It should also allow you to update and add policies with ease.

A state-of-the-art centralized management tool will offer a single pane of glass so that you can monitor and manage your gear in one window and not have to call up multiple management programs. It will also offer updates on the “health” of your data center network, determining if patches are up to date, software versions are correct, and security software such as anti-virus is in effect.

Centralized management is important not just for your enterprise today, but as you move forward. Consider a large university located in Canada, which plays ISP to the school’s 300 departments and almost 40,000 users.

The supervisor of network management services at the university mentioned that they have very little control over what happens beyond the university’s core network – no managerial or purchase power. The departments are pretty much autonomous and there is not much opportunity to build synergies between projects or to leverage economies of scale.

This situation is incredibly frustrating for the IT team as the CIO has challenged them to improve the breadth, quality and consistency of services at the university. They hope that deploying a centralized network management platform would enable him to not only meet the CIO’s mandate, but exceed it.

They are confident the centralized management will ensure standardization across all the organization’s sites and help to develop and maintain a consistent image among all hardware and software. For instance, the IT team would be able to create VLAN configurations that each department could implement in a repeatable – and error-free – manner.

In addition to the security and stability this move will offer the data center, it will also positively impact costs. Centralization and automation will allow the university team to redirect IT resources that would have been tied up with manual configurations and oversight to be used on more strategic projects.

This type of innovation is helping the university and other academic institutions stay competitive with a next-generation data center.