By Monique Lucey
Last week I attended Educause in Denver including a session given by Dennis O’Reilly, Network Architect at The University of British Columbia. In his presentation, O’Reilly provided an interesting look at the payoffs of network virtualization. He detailed the innovative way in which UBC is virtualizing the campus network to increase security, provide new functionality and reduce energy. Virtualizing the UBC network enabled many other services including wireless, VPN, virtual devices (VMs), virtual storage (SAN), virtual desktops and virtual load balancers.
During his discussion, O’Reilly mentioned a compelling conversation with Dave Foss, IT Director of Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. O’Reilly attended a CIO Networking Forum sponsored by Dell and 3Com at the Hotel Teatro in downtown Denver. The CIO Networking Forum was hosted by Dave from MIT and Fred Tarca, Chief Information Technology Officer of Quinnipiac University. The event included a roundtable discussion on such topics as: How to leverage IT to help recruit students, attract funding and support research initiatives.
Dave Foss talked about his primary responsibility at MIT — to provide the best infrastructure and support possible to enable leading-edge research initiatives, attract grants and funding, and to recruit and retain the world’s brightest minds. Dave explained that the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics required 10GE connections to support testing of a next-generation MRI machine in their lab and needed the network capabilities and flexibility to adapt to new requirements in order to compete for grants. MIT has earned significant research grants because they can provide the best network infrastructure, and this has enabled his lab to grow faster than any other lab on campus.
A top priority for Fred Tarca at Quinnipiac University is to ensure that the network meets student and parent expectation. Fred views parents as paying customers and is committed to delivering the level of support and service they expect. He also requires the same level of commitment to customer support from their vendors.
One of the things not discussed in either Dennis O’Reilly’s session or the CIO Networking Forum was how network virtualization might play out in a multivendor environment. The reality is that current best practices for running today’s network infrastructures apply to both a single or multivendor network. For example, establishing well-defined, open standards boundaries between the access and core network layers provides a logical demarcation to deploy a different vendor solution if it makes feature/function or economic sense to do so.
Gartner recently published a research note around this very topic citing that: “The operational impacts of introducing a second vendor for basic network infrastructure are modest and easily handled by most organizations.” It continued: “Introducing a second vendor will reduce capital expenditures (capex) by at least 30% (and often more), while only minimally increasing operational expenditures (opex).”
Three key themes echoed throughout the event as being critical to academic institutions today: delivering centralized services, network speed and world-class service. With the conference behind me and another year quickly drawing to a close, I look ahead and wonder how higher education networks will evolve over the next five years? Where academic institutions will invest next? Let us know what you think.
