Cisco Cisco Prime Infrastructure 3.0 Information Guide
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Customer Case Study
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Customer Name: University of Granada
Industry: Education
Location: Granada, Spain
Number of Employees: 5,000 employees;
80,000 students
80,000 students
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
● Support collaboration between researchers,
teachers, and students worldwide
● Support e-learning and access to online
resources, including HD video resources
● Help ensure network security and stability
NETWORK SOLUTION
● Upgraded Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series
Switches on campus
● Deployed Cisco Nexus Switches in data
centers
● Leveraged private high-capacity fibre network
with future plans to support 100 Gigabit
Ethernet (GE)
Ethernet (GE)
BUSINESS RESULTS
● New services delivered to students and staff,
increasing user satisfaction
● Integrated network solution simplifies and
centralizes management
● International Excellence Award provided funds
for future network investments
Spanish University Supports New Services with
Network Upgrade
Network Upgrade
University of Granada prepares to meet future needs by enhancing Cisco
infrastructure.
infrastructure.
Business Challenge
The earliest universities were built in towns or cities, the
communication hubs of their day, because the best education
requires sharing of ideas with other people. These days, with
communication and collaboration more important than ever,
universities create their own hubs, which often extend far beyond
their physical campuses.
The Univers
ity of Granada has risen to the challenges of today’s
educational environment: it was the first university in Spain to run a
10 GE backbone, which it did in 2005 on Cisco Catalyst
®
6500
Series switches. It offers 80,000 students e-learning services as well
as classes at its eight campuses: five in Granada, two in North
Africa, and one virtual campus (CVI-UGR). The university spans 70
buildings on its eight campuses, and needs to provide all members
of the community with high-speed access to both internal and
external resources. In particular, it has to help ensure that its world-
class researchers can communicate with each other and with experts
around the world, quickly and in high definition whenever possible.
In 2011, Antonio Ruiz Moya, chief technology officer at University of
Granada, recognized that its existing infrastructure could no longer
support the demands of its scientific community, students, and staff.
New end users and applications were coming onstream, as were
new services including cloud, high-performance computing (HPC), video, voice over IP (VoIP), and SAN services.
The university received the Campus of International Excellence Award in 2009 and allocated a portion of the award
funds in 2011 for the renewal of its network infrastructure on its eight campuses.
“In order to ensure the security and stability of our network, we needed load-balancing for our infrastructure and
flexible reconfiguration in case we encountered problems with the fibre optic network,” Ruiz Moya says. “Plus, we
flexible reconfiguration in case we encountered problems with the fibre optic network,” Ruiz Moya says. “Plus, we
wanted to take full advantage of our own high-capacity fibre network, ultimately creating a 160 GE backbone, more
than 16 times faster that what the local metropolitan area
network is capable of.”
“The Cisco Catalyst and Nexus solution had proven robust in meeting our needs,” says Ruiz Moya. “We had
already begun using software features of the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch to enable load-balancing between
servers and access monitoring. We chose Cisco because its global architecture configuration offered all the
features we needed and enabled us to manage everything from a single console.”
features we needed and enabled us to manage everything from a single console.”