Extreme Networks® Preps Bellarmine to Fulfill Ambitious IT Mission Statement
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College Preparatory School Boosts Infrastructure Performance and Reliability with Award-Winning Switches from Extreme Networks
Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, California, is a Jesuit secondary school which was founded in 1851 as Santa Clara College for secondary and college age students. In the early 1920's, Santa Clara College became Santa Clara University and Santa Clara Prep and in 1926, Santa Clara Prep changed its name to Bellarmine College Preparatory in honor of sixteenth century Jesuit Robert Cardinal Bellarmine. With 1,400 students and 200 faculty and staff, more than 95 percent of the school's graduates go on to attend colleges and universities throughout the country.

The Challenge
In 1997, Bellarmine needed to update an unreliable infrastructure that had been put together with a mixture of disparate equipment and standardize on a platform that would meet its technology goals then and well into the future to support streaming video, voice-over-IP (VoIP), and wireless.

"When teachers would go to use the network back then, it would be so unreliable and slow that they would often have to completely change their lesson plans," said Chris Carey, Bellarmine's Director of Technology.

Bellarmine set out to create a high performance, fault-tolerant network, turning to leading switch vendors to learn about their solutions. After careful review, Bellarmine decided on Extreme Networks for its award-winning and cost-effective Gigabit Ethernet switches.

The Solution
"At the time, Extreme was the only vendor we talked to offering Gigabit Ethernet," said Carey. "We made our choice based on brand—Extreme had already made a great name for itself in terms of cost-effectiveness, performance and reliability. And the proof has been astounding: since we installed the first Extreme Networks gear, we've never had a network performance issue."

"We have benefited tremendously from the reliability of the new Extreme Networks infrastructure," said Chris Meyercord, Assistant Principal at Bellarmine. "It's a great benefit to know all our constituents—students, staff, and administrators—can reliably count on high-speed network and Internet connectivity all the time."

"Once we put in the first Extreme Networks switches, that's when technology in the classroom took off for us," said Carey. "Now we're 100 percent Extreme after going through three progressive phases and the network is what it should be—a cost effective, high performance, and reliable infrastructure that's simple to manage."

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Over the next two phases, Extreme Networks introduced the Summit7i, Summit48, Summit48si and Summit24e3 switches, and most recently the Alpine 3808 chassis switch into the eight building campus network, which includes a science center, library, theater, counseling center, chapel, and gymnasium, as well as classroom and administrative buildings. Two Alpine 3808 switches reside in the redundant core, while Summit2, Summit48, Summit48si and Summit24e3 switches power the edge and a high-density Summit7i stackable switch gives the school gigabit server connectivity. The entire solution is centrally managed with Extreme Networks' EPICenter full-featured network management suite.

The Results
A Network That Inspires
With the new infrastructure, all of Bellarmine's classrooms are equipped with Internet connected computers and LCD projector systems, and Internet access is readily available for students, faculty, and staff throughout the campus at conveniently located kiosks. A redundant gigabit fiber-optic backbone feeds into each classroom and the entire network is overseen by Chris Carey, who works closely with faculty and Extreme Networks to further enhance the classroom experience.

Extreme Networks played a big part in the development of Bellarmine's Information Technology mission statement, which was adopted in January 1998 after the first network phase. This mission statement includes the goal of providing facilities that give faculty, staff and students easy access to the most recent educational tools and remaining current in all areas of IT as a way of ensuring the highest level of computer instruction and usage.

"The students really benefit the most from our Extreme network," said Carey. "Today, as more and more things are connected via IP each day, they are building their own home networks and hosting web sites, and they're proficient in email and chat applications. They really devour technology in general. A network like ours inspires them to learn more about networking technology, push the envelope and think of all the possibilities in their personal and professional futures."

To promote these thoughts and practices and to help students decide if a career in networking is a fit for them, Carey led an Introduction to Networking course which taught the basics and good practices of building reliable and secure Ethernet LANs, along with highlighting the societal implications networking has on a global level. Said Carey, "The kids ate it up, when I showed them how they could configure our Extreme switches with their web-based Vista interface or the CLI, it really got them excited about the doors opening to them. They learned a lot from the experience and that's what it's all about."

Bellarmine also recently started an internship program designed to help students gain work experience—either in a field they are already familiar with or one they think they might be interested in. For this program, Extreme Networks helped the school in two ways, according to Carey.

"Extreme Networks hired two Bellarmine students as interns for their Interoperability lab—the same lab that helped us design our network for VoIP deployment, and then Bellarmine hired two students to work on the actual deployment of the Extreme Networks gear. They loved working with the Extreme equipment, and with a small amount of basic instruction were able to configure the boxes along with me, which really helped speed the whole process up. We are very grateful for our partnership with Extreme Networks."

Higher Performance for Leading Edge Applications
With the new infrastructure, teachers never have to change a course plan due to network inefficiencies, and students enjoy high performance Internet access, email, file sharing and web site hosting. The school provides a web page for every student who wants one, which they can learn to design and manage in various multimedia and programming courses, and every student also has a network and email account which they use to communicate with each other and with their teachers and parents.

"When our students sign on to a PC anywhere on campus, all of their personal favorites and settings follow them," said Carey. "They're able to pull up their work from shared and personal home directories on the Extreme network quickly and easily, get the job done and not have to worry about whether or not the technology is going to hold them back."

The Extreme Networks infrastructure also allows the Bellarmine library to offer high-speed Internet access for a multitude of online resources and file its card catalog system electronically. And finally, faculty and staff enjoy easy access to new online attendance and grading systems.

QoS Supports Voice and Video
With the latest network phase, Bellarmine introduced videoconferencing and a new VoIP system. Extreme Networks provides eight levels of Quality of Service (QoS) to meet the school's performance requirements for voice, streaming video, and video on- demand, protecting latency-sensitive voice traffic from bursty, bandwidth-intensive data and video applications. The school's VoIP system is built on Extreme Networks switches and Cisco's Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data (AVVID) components, including Cisco IP phones and gateways.

"The robustness of the system we have in place really enables us to be an industry leader as we move forward with new technologies—streaming video, VoIP and so on," said Meyercord. "That's all due to the reliability of the network we now have."

"We were told AVVID wouldn't work well with Extreme switches, but Extreme proved to us otherwise," said Carey. "Extreme told us that it would work and proceeded to prove it to us in their lab, spending an entire day showing us how we'd set it up at our campus. That's just one example of how Extreme Networks goes above and beyond what other vendors do for their customers."

Bellarmine's network has prompted discussions of how to leverage streaming video and video conferencing to enrich the student learning experience. For instance, the school is excited about pursuing the application of connecting communities. Bellarmine hopes to extend their videoconferencing program internationally to allow students on campus to share in the experiences of classmates who travel to other countries doing missionary work.

"We do a lot of work in other countries, sending students to build houses or improve existing facilities," said Carey. "We'd love to leverage videoconferencing and add a feed to these places, like Tijuana, El Salvador, Guaymas and Uruguay, so that our students here in San Jose can be a part of that rich experience via video. Anything is possible with Extreme Networks."

Feature-Rich Solution Enhances Reliability and Security
The fault-tolerance and redundancy built into Extreme Networks' award-winning switches allow Bellarmine to reliably support latency-sensitive applications like VoIP, bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming media, and other mission-critical applications like online grading and attendance systems.

"Reliability has been incredible with Extreme," said Carey. "I've never experienced any down time. And if something were to go down, I'd know before anyone else realized it since EPICenter would automatically page me to let me know. I'd be able to fix a problem before anyone noticed it existed in the first place."

In addition, Extreme Networks' Layer 3 Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) capabilities allow Bellarmine to separate traffic by department or function, such as voice, video or data, which greatly enhances network performance since each VLAN is assigned a specific bandwidth amount. VLANs also create logical barriers that isolate information access to authorized personnel only, ensuring private information (social security numbers, grades, payroll information, etc.) is not accessible to unauthorized users on the network.

Simplicity Reduces Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Bellarmine utilizes Extreme Networks' EPICenter management suite for a global view and centralized management of its network, which simplifies configuration, troubleshooting, and status monitoring, and helps save time by streamlining common tasks. In addition, all of the products, including software and management platforms, share a consistent architecture, which translates into end-to-end simplicity and ease of management. In other words, Bellarmine did not need to hire someone specifically to manage the network.

"I come from a background of learning everything having to do with a network on my own and with the help of peers, and it was incredibly easy to figure out the Extreme Networks gear," said Carey. "It's really simple to use, and their CLI makes sense so we don't need a full-time network person to manage it. And now that we've merged voice and data, it's even further simplified since that's half the ports we need to maintain. We handle everything from desktop issues and network changes to audiovisual and projection requests with two IT people. Considering the scope of our network, that's pretty amazing."

Ready for the Future
Bellarmine is researching how they might convert their tape-based video resources to a streamable electronic format and store them on a video-on-demand server for distribution to classrooms upon request, which will also benefit teachers who need to view instructional courses in order to fulfill accreditation requirements. The Extreme Networks infrastructure with Policy-Based QoS is ready whenever Bellarmine is. The school is also planning to install a multicasting system to deliver coverage of various influential speakers who visit Bellarmine in order to allow all of its students—wherever their classes happen to be at the time—to hear an event live, removing the need for a new facility with more seating capacity. Extreme Networks is ready.

"Before Extreme Networks, we had no online systems like grading or attendance tracking, and now we do," said Carey. "All our students have reliable email and Internet access, we introduced a money-saving and reliable VoIP phone system, and extended the campus through connecting students at home. Whenever we do upgrades or add ports, it's all plug and play, that's it—just reconnect quickly and it goes. Next we plan to add wireless, and things just continue to get better and better for us. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked by students if we have 802.11b access. While we do use 801.22b wireless in a limited way already, we have yet to deploy a full-scale campus-wide wireless LAN. It's in the works and I have no doubt the Extreme Networks infrastructure will be able to support it."

"We're very pleased with Extreme Networks, from their high performance and reliable equipment to the company's experienced and responsive sales and engineering teams. We look forward to continuing our technology partnership with Extreme Networks well into the future," concluded Carey.