ProCurve Networking by HP - Customer stories

	ProCurve solution promises to cut University network maintenance costs by up to 85 per cent
	"Our decision to opt for a ProCurve solution and particularly our move to 8200 series core switches will benefit the institution in many ways. Implementing ProCurve has been a dream of a project and there are not many vendors I can say that about." Lee Rose Information Systems Network Manager University of Westminster United Kingdom

University of Westminster was founded in 1838 as Britain’s first polytechnic. Employing 1,500 staff and catering for 22,000 students, it is now one of the UK’s top centres for overseas study with 5,000 foreign students coming from over 150 countries.

Westminster has a number of sites around the London area, each with their own core and edge network infrastructure providing connections within each site. Each site is connected to the others with a meshed network topology. Catering for 5,700 desktop PCs, this involves more than 400 active network devices and 15,000 fixed data outlets.

To support the need for high system availability, the university runs a rolling five year programme of network upgrades which recently took place at the Harrow site, its largest site which hosts the Harrow Business School, the Harrow School of Computing Science and the School of Media, Arts and Design as well as a large Learning Resource Centre.

With 5,000 switch ports, Harrow’s network edge infrastructure was composed of old 3Com switches. These switches had to be replaced because they were at the end of their lifecycle and were no-longer supported. However, initial plans were to retain the Foundry BigIron core platform which was still delivering acceptable performance despite being expensive to support and maintain.

Compelling argument
Westminster considered new solutions from Foundry, Cisco and ProCurve Networking. ProCurve was put forward by Westminster’s long-term technology partner ADA Networks which brought its strong technical resources to the table and provided the final equipment. The three vendors were compared in terms of cost, ease of configuration, deployment and management. The Cisco option was discounted for a number of reasons including cost, product roadmap and multiple ‘bolt on’ additions which complicated the solution. Following a visit to Foundry in the US, Westminster considered retaining BigIron at the core to capitalise on its previous investment in both cost and knowledge base, but that was set to change.

“We wanted resilience, security, availability, scalability, useability, ease of management and monitoring, ease of installation, reduced power consumption, increased performance and cost effectiveness. We chose ProCurve because it ticked all these boxes and also comes with a free lifetime, next business day warranty*,” says Lee Rose, Information Systems Network Manager at Westminster. “Specialists at the ProCurve European headquarters in Grenoble put a compelling and convincing case to us. They showed us the products and roadmap but did not give us the hard sell you get from some vendors.”

Eventually, Westminster decided to replace all edge, core and wireless equipment at Harrow with ProCurve, and since this location is regarded as the reference site for the rest of the university network, ProCurve will be rolled across the whole organisation over the next three to five years.

Core decision
“Our final decision was confirmed by a subsequent visit from the ProCurve team when they showed us the roadmap for the new ProCurve 8200 series switch. It was absolutely compelling, would enable us to drive down our recurrent costs and confirmed that going with ProCurve was a no brainer,” adds Rose.

The ProCurve Switch 8212zl is a highperformance, highly available chassis switch platform that enables unified core-to-edge adaptive network solutions and is the industry’s first core switch with a lifetime warranty.

The installation of the equipment at Harrow was divided into three phases which were implemented in-house by Westminster’s Network Team, underlining ProCurve’s ease of installation. Firstly, nearly 5,000 3Com switch ports were taken out and replaced with ProCurve switches. It was seamless and took two technicians just a month to complete – a timescale described by Westminster as ‘absolutely brilliant’.

Secondly, on one Friday evening, the Foundry core was replaced with ProCurve 8200zl switches. Phase three saw the replacement of the existing Bluesocket and Proxim wireless infrastructure with a set of ProCurve Wireless Edge Service Modules (WESM) providing blanket coverage with 83 coordinated radio ports.

Sound investment
With its ability to manage both ProCurve and non-ProCurve products from a single platform, ProCurve Manager Plus software is already giving Westminster new visibility into the operation of their network. Further management fine-tuning is planned along with the future implementation of a ProCurve Network Access Control (NAC) system to provide additional security.

Benefits have already been experienced from the network refresh. Departments whose applications really push the bandwidth have commented on the increased performance delivered by the availability of Gigabit Ethernet on each desktop. The fact that every port also has Power over Ethernet (PoE) capability means that Westminster can deploy IP Telephony or additional wireless LAN radio-ports in any location.

Financial benefits for the ProCurve deal included an attractive £67,000 redemption on the trade-in of its old 3Com switches against the ProCurve procurement. This trade-in was based on 42 ProCurve switches with 4,836 switch ports. All support Gbit to the desktop, 62 per cent provide PoE and 76 per cent introduce sFlow technology for deep packet inspection and management purposes.

sFlow is an industry standard technology for monitoring high speed switched networks. It gives complete visibility into the use of networks, enabling performance optimisation, accounting/billing for usage, and defence against security threats.

“By comparing a ProCurve 2900-48G against a similar Foundry device, we have calculated that we are saving about 44 per cent on network investment for the total number of switch ports. Basing this on 4,836 ports equates to a saving in the region of £140,000,” says Rose. “Also, the price per port was approximately £36 for ProCurve and £65 for Foundry. Looking at the longterm TCO and ROI, as we continue to replace Foundry with ProCurve over the next three to four years, we anticipate that the revenue budget will be cut by 75 to 85 per cent,” concludes Rose.