Connection maths

The American University of Beirut has invested in a network upgrade to improve bandwidth provision and enable better service delivery.

The American University of Beirut (AUB) is one of the more well known and trusted educational institutions in the capital city of Lebanon.

The university plays host to an ever-growing number of students and faculty and is constantly involved in improving the courses and services it offers its varied stakeholders. This same interest is paid to its IT infrastructure as well.

"AUB has a medium size network with an Ethernet switched architecture optimised to best fit the IT services and datacentres' distribution. AUB architecture is fully redundant and resilient, and is designed and optimised to provide an agile environment capable of adjusting to the change in traffic flow demands and provisioned to maximise security," says Rabih Itani, assistant director for operations and manager of data communication services, computing and networking services (CNS) at AUB.

"At the core of AUB is a mesh of interlinked Layer 2/3 and Layer 4 aware Ethernet switches which in turn connect the wiring closets as well as the various service controllers. The centrally controlled wireless network services are provisioned as an overlay on top of the wired network as is the case with security traffic control and sanitisation systems, thus enabling the separation of layers and enabling an easy to change and operate network. Distributed, clustered as well as multi-tiered services are easily integrated with the above network layers while application accelerators are plugged in where they are needed," Itani continues.

AUB has two main datacentres in the campus and two more for the medical centre apart from smaller datacentres for certain departments. These datacentres host and provide several apps and services.

While the main datacentres provide everything common to the campus, the department specific server rooms only provide applications relevant to them.

AUB strives to keep up with the continuous demand for connectivity, speed, security and service delivery as mandated by its 12,000 plus user community. This user community connect to the network through 5,000 wired nodes, 4,000 wireless nodes, and from outside the campus.

All IT related to AUB is operated and maintained by the thirty member CNS department. The department is structured with multiple interdependent teams of specialists who have specific areas of concentration.

Move to scale

Last year, AUB felt the need to upgrade its existing core switches and to implement a set which sported newer features and will enable the university to scale easily with growth.

"Six driving factors necessitated the network upgrade. There was the need to replace end-of-life hardware, introduce a new generation of ASICs that enable new feature sets and higher switching capacities to meet the expected increase of demand for speed and reduction in communication jitter. We also wanted to introduce, on a gradual basis, 10 Gigabit Ethernet switched interfaces to link the main datacentres in order to provision for the anticipated increase in bandwidth needs and traffic volumes as well as redesign for higher availability at the network core and datacentres to meet end user services availability expectations, and increase the business criticality levels of IT services. We wanted tighter device and network security and provision for a new layer of security that would provide better armour. Moreover, we wanted to sustain and expand existing services and improve capacity to add more services, especially on the wireless and IP-telephony side," says Itani.

According to Itani, the much-needed upgrade of the existing chassis based switching core faced tight budget constraints.

Moreover, AUB realised that the operational life time of chassis core switches is limited as the possibility of reusing them at other network layers is not a viable option given the power and space limitations and the maintenance and port costs at the aggregation layer and wiring closets.

"Researching available products and solutions in the market, AUB identified new families of Gigabit Ethernet stackable switches that enjoy sufficient switching performance capabilities, and a rich set of features providing high availability, security and scalability capabilities, and can be equipped with necessary 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces to meet AUB's set objectives," says Itani.

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After a thorough analysis and comparison of various offers from almost all major players in the stackable Ethernet switches market, 3Com's 5500G-EI switch was selected by the university.

"Their switches provided proven switching capacity, highest stacking performance and the highest SPF port density. Moreover, 3Com's 5500G-EI switch listed rich feature sets and wide support of industry standard protocols, enjoyed extensive controls, and a promised a broad roadmap - all delivered at a very reasonably priced cost structure," explains Itani.

Thirteen stacks of 3Com's Superstack 5500G-EI switch model were meshed using 10 Gigabit and multi-gigabit links.

These switches in turn connected, via Gigabit links, more than 120 wiring closets and server racks, wireless controllers, directly connected servers, call managers, firewalls as well as intrusion detection and prevention systems, and WAN routers.

AUB sourced the 3Com products from the firm's representative in Lebanon, Tetracom, and enforced an acceptance test procedure to insure products' compliance and good operation.

CNS' network team, which initially designed the network, was trained onsite on the product specifics by 3Com authorised trainers. This same team then deployed the solution.

"We were in extensive discussion with 3Com and its partner during the process of evaluation and we found that the company concentrates on its technology unlike a few other vendors in the market. The favourable technical analysis of the firm's products was boosted by 3Com's commitment to the project success and to a long term relation with AUB. Former 3Com CEO, Edgar Masri, personally directed the sales operation and visited the university to make sure that 3Com introduces itself as a committed partner to AUB," states Itani.

The core switches live replacement tasks were executed after the end of the academic summer term and before the start of the new academic year to insure lowest impact possible on the user community.

The replacement was done over a period of two weeks, with one stack replaced per day at preset time slots identified with lowest network use. The implementation was completed on schedule in September 2007.

Itani states: "One challenge that we faced was the risk of interoperability issues between the new 3Com switches and the non-3Com devices, especially the old chassis switches, given that the upgrade had to be done one stack at a time. However, AUB's deployment of standards-only protocols mitigated such risks and allowed trouble-free interoperability. Another challenge was the ability to design and configure the new 3Com switches to continue to run existing network services such as Access Control Lists, while adding new ones. This challenge was addressed with a meticulous review of the design at different network layers and a multilevel audited configuration."

Into the project

According to Itani, the 3Com core switches are delivering on all the published objectives that necessitated the upgrade in the first place.

The new switches fixed all the network glitches suffered with the old switches, provided higher switching performance levels with dynamic link aggregation and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and higher resiliency levels with enforced standard protocols like MSTP, VRRP and LACP.

Moreover, the switches provided a valuable information base for AUB configuration management and network monitoring tools to collect from.

"The processes of responding to incidents and problems are now more focused given that the core layer is more reliable and the configuration management tools are more capable of gathering the much needed information. Also, the focus of networking processes has now shifted from solely providing connectivity to providing network services which best fit the devices and applications to be connected," says Itani.

The new core has also enabled more effective use of tools like configuration management tools, and of complex scenarios such as clustered services.

"Given the low initial, running, and spare parts cost of deploying stackable switches, and given the reusability of stackable switches at different network layers for an additional number of years, the return on investment is high as compared to other solutions. In addition to the above, the reduction in downtime events, the scalability in terms of port density and bandwidth, and the time savings in managing connectivity all contribute to faster returns," points out Itani.

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Apart from the network upgrade, the team at CNS have also put in place application accelerators, upgraded the datacentre for better space provision and power capacities, and expanded wireless coverage during 2007.

IT operations and management are based on ITIL guidelines and recommendations.

Projects in 2008 will focus on tightening the security layers more, configuring resiliency for selected services and applications, upgrading the call centre and enforcing more ITIL processes.

Working toward a single goal

Part of the reason for the success of most IT projects in AUB is the stringent evaluation process that precedes implementation.

"CNS works on short (one year), medium (two years) and long (five years) term strategic plans that are in line with AUB's strategic plans. The department is always on the run collecting end-user feedback, identifying existing services' weaknesses, analysing market trends, researching solutions and following up on industry updates. When the team identifies a technology that can add value, solve a problem, or address a need, it is studied by a departmental committee. If the solution is labeled as technically feasible by the CNS committee, a blueprint is prepared and presented to upper management. If the upper management approves the blueprint, the solution is inserted into the strategic plan and is assigned a project. Once budgets are secured, solutions are deployed," says Itani.

It is worth mentioning that if CNS spots an opportunity to introduce a solution or a technology at AUB with highly favorable conditions or low financial impact, CNS works with the upper management to swiftly alter plan schedules and avail necessary budget to procure and deploy solutions.

This later strategy has enabled the university to enjoy many region firsts and regional best solutions despite budget constraints.

"After a deployment is complete, a self assessment, and if applicable, a customer assessment, is carried out with lessons learned and documented," continues Itani.

Another strong reason is the regulated budget process that enables the IT team to deliver more with available capital.

The IT budget consists of an annual operation budget and capital budgets usually covering a period of two years.

The operation budget is based on historical trends adjusted to correct the gaps in previous budgets and/or to meet planned expansions or improvements. The capital budget is a competitive budget based on proposals raised by IT or business owners.

The capital budget proposals are supported by business cases. These are reviewed and prioritised by an IT committee, mapped against the university IT strategic plan, pre-approved, and presented to the budget committee for financing.

The head of IT and business owners are invited to the budget committee to present and defend the budget requests. Once there is agreement on the budget, this is presented to the Board of Trustees' for their review.

However, the key to the far-ranging success that IT initiatives continue to enjoy at AUB may very well be the support afforded by senior management. The IT team at AUB has always had and continues to enjoy a level of direct involvement with the higher management team.

The senior management is directly involved in the development, alignment and monitoring of the university wide IT plan as well as in the departmental IT plan.

The management is represented in the IT steering committee, sponsors IT projects and even conducts IT performance reviews.

In summary AUB senior management is fully engaged in setting and aligning the IT directions, maximising the return on investments and return on assets, minimising the total cost of ownership and assuring that IT is adding value to the mission of the university by enhancing teaching, learning and research.

And that is certainly an example worth copying.