3 April 2003 Glasgow, Scotland -- The University of Strathclyde has installed a new 10G Ethernet network, said to be the first in a European university. The Foundry Networks installation was signed with the support of partner, Total Network Solutions.
The network provides improved capacity for the university's 50,000 students and faculties who are sending increasingly large amounts of data and applications. The network serves 67 buildings across its 500 acre campus.
Founded in 1796 and based in Glasgow, Strathclyde is the third largest university in Scotland and teaches full-time, part time and distance learning students in five faculties. It is also the UK's largest provider of postgraduate and professional education.
The installation of Founfry's BigIron 8000 and BigIron 15000 Layer 3 backbone switches across the campus is the first phase of the project being implemented by Total Network Solutions. The 10G Ethernet link provides intelligent connectivity between the two main data centres, which are more than 1km apart.
The link will support research projects at The Strathclyde Institute for Drug Research and the Institute of Photonics. The second and third phases of the project will see the replacement of legacy network switches from other data centres with Foundry switches and the implementing of Foundry ServerIron Layer 4-7 switches for intelligent web server optimisation and content distribution.
Dr Stuart Brough, director of Information Technology at the University of Strathclyde said, "We have seen a dramatic uptake in network performance, availability and connectivity with the new 10G network, which is also easily handling much larger files. In particular, University design students and researchers can use the network to handle much larger datasets."
The previous legacy network consisted of switches lacking the high performance and scalable Layer 2 and Layer 3 intelligence. The project was put out to tender through the Official Journal of the European Communities (OJEC).
The University of Strathclyde is in the early stages of using Foundry's JetCore technology to monitor network traffic and enable departments to be billed for use of the network. Real time network monitoring and billing down to byte level will be achieved through Foundry's sFlow technology which also enables the creation of a system-wide performance window of application traffic to pinpoint performance-impacting areas throughout the network. This will be augmented by IronWare network management software.