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.
Tags: Campus LAN, Centralized management
