Extreme Networks® High Performance, Reliable Solution Reduces Total Cost of Network Ownership for Humber College
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Located in the west end of Toronto, Humber College is one of Canada's largest and most respected community colleges, offering 150 full-time diploma programs, more than 200 certificate programs and over 1,000 courses through Continuing Education. With nine schools, including Schools of Applied Technology, Business, Creative and Performing Arts, Health Sciences, Hospitality, Recreation and Tourism, Media Studies and more, the college annually attracts over 12,000 full-time students, 28,000 part-time students and 5,000 employees from Canada and around the world.

The Challenge
In 2000, Humber College had an outdated and under performing ATM network they knew would not sustain its anticipated growth. They needed a robust and versatile Gigabit Ethernet solution that would expand easily to support the addition of more high-bandwidth applications and a growing number of students and personnel. After turning to leading network vendors, Humber College narrowed it down to two and asked each of them to present a network design based on specific needs they highlighted. Placing priority on price-for-performance, simplicity, and scalability, Humber College decided on Extreme Networks as its technology partner.

The Solution
The College consists of two campuses: the main North Campus with a dozen buildings, and the remote Lakeshore Campus with seven buildings. The buildings within each campus are connected with fiber and the two campuses are connected across 19 kilometers (almost 12 miles) with a 100 mbps link, creating a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN).

Extreme Networks provided Humber College with a complete Gigabit Ethernet solution based on its award winning BlackDiamond® and Summit® switches and network management. Humber College has six BlackDiamond 6808 switches—five in the main core on North Campus and one at the Lakeshore core, and two Summit5i, seventy Summit48 and six Summit24 switches at the edge. Extreme Networks' EPICenter® management suite simplifies network configuration, troubleshooting, management and monitoring allowing the college to make configuration and VLAN changes on the fly.

"With the Extreme Networks solution, we have confidence and trust in the network that it is always going to work," said Jane Dearing, Manager of Technology Architecture for Humber College. "We no longer need to make alternative plans to get around limitations."

The Results
Reliability and Performance Improve Educational Experience
Extreme Networks' high-performance network solution has improved the educational experience for students by speeding up various applications, including model rendering for design visualization, for instance in the use of animation or architectural design. Files created with this application are extremely large, and must be transferred back and forth multiple times between workstation nodes. The Extreme Networks' Gigabit Ethernet solution provides more than enough bandwidth to support this bandwidth-intensive application. Furthermore, the VLAN capabilities allow the college to separate traffic by building, department or school, which further guarantees high-performance and helps in tracking bandwidth and usage patterns to ensure accurate planning.

"The labs have noticed the biggest improvement in bandwidth and reliability," said Dearing. "With the previous network, one lab would interfere with another because we weren't able to support as many VLANs as we needed. At the time we could support three VLANs, whereas now we have 160. That alone improved performance. Also, having the ability run at wire-speed was a critical factor for us."

Performance and Simplicity Lowers Total Cost of Ownership
Extreme Networks' EPICenter management suite simplifies Humber College's network configuration, troubleshooting, and management tasks with an easy-to-use, intuitive interface. In addition, Extreme Networks' switches are built on a common architecture which further simplifies maintenance and reduces operating costs.

"One thing we had before that we definitely wanted to fix was multiple management packages for all the products in the network," said Dearing. "The Extreme Networks' switches, which share a common architecture, are all managed with one product which simplifies everything and saves us a lot of time. We've also been able to introduce access rules, eliminating the need to invest in, deploy and manage firewalls. Extreme Networks has definitely lowered our total cost of ownership."

"It used to take a great deal of time to support our labs, deploy applications, manage and troubleshoot the network, and support backups across the network," said Adrian Venuti, Network Administrator with Humber College. "With the Extreme's Gigabit Ethernet solution, which is fast, reliable and centrally managed, all of that is much easier and quicker. It's definitely made day-to-day network operations much easier. Plus, I have all that time to do other things."

Extreme Networks' Policy-Based Quality of Service (QoS) allows Humber College even further network control based on application and traffic load. By identifying certain high-bandwidth applications and heavy traffic patterns and creating policies, certain areas of the network are allotted extra bandwidth so that other areas of the network are not slowed down.

Partners in Quality
Humber College appreciates the professionalism and responsiveness it has received from the Extreme Networks' organization and considers the company to be a close business partner.

"It's typical of Extreme to go above and beyond what other vendors would even think of giving us," said Dearing. "It never fails to surprise me how far the Extreme Networks' team will go to support us, even to the point of giving up personal time. They are very dedicated to customer service." Planning for the future with Extreme Networks, Humber College is faced with a major expansion in the next year with the addition of a classroom building and a residence hall with 700 rooms that will require Internet access. These buildings are part of a new university, the University of Guelph-Humber, which is the collaboration of Humber College and the University of Guelph (in Guelph, Ontario, and approximately 50 miles from Toronto). It is a new, innovative option in post-secondary education, building on the combined strengths and traditions of the two leading educational institutions.

Humber College will also add more buildings, both residential and academic, to its own network over the next year, and Extreme Networks is definitely part of those plans.

"We're happy with the Extreme Networks' solution and plan on continuing to work closely with them as we grow and add more applications," concluded Dearing.