HP ProCurve Networking - Customer stories

	Politecnico di Torino
	“ProCurve Networking technology offers all thebenefits of reliability, security, scalability and simplicity that we wanted from our wireless network, and its wireless mobility solutions have transformed the way that the university operates. You see students working everywhere, even in a nearby park. Also the lecturers and staff like the flexibility that ProCurve offers because they can move around the buildings and collaborate on projects more easily.” Marcello Maggiora Head of local and geographical networks Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Politecnico di Torino, the Polytechnic University of Turin, is a European centre of excellence for technical scientific training in engineering and architectural research.

Maintaining efficient lines of communication is vital because the Politecnico is spread over 17 campuses both in Turin and the surrounding Piedmont district where 3,000 staff support 35,000 students in more than 40 departments and faculties.

Following current trends in education, the Politecnico wanted an ‘anytime, anywhere’ network resource that would enable students and staff to work remotely with laptops and handheld devices. This would enable increased productivity and flexibility, and would also free up the desktop computers in the Politecnico’s highly specialised labs.

The solution to this was to extend the existing wired network with the addition of a new wireless network. As well as its security and mobility requirement, the Politecnico also needed a single converged solution for heterogeneous media including both managed and uncontrolled PCs, mobile computers, phones and PDAs, so it was vital that there was interoperability between the wired and wireless networks.

The ProCurve Adaptive EDGE Architecture™
The challenge of extending networked services across such a large organisation was achieved thanks to technology from ProCurve Networking, based on industry standards for easy migration, reduced network complexity and takes a unified infrastructure approach to network design and architecture. Featuring the unique ProCurve Adaptive EDGE Architecture™ (AEA) which enables control at the edge of the network, this network implementation, which comes with the standard lifetime warranty, was built with the aim of ensuring that the Politecnico could dynamically adapt to changing needs.

“This project was defined by a workgroup in the university and the features we were looking for were reliability, security, simplicity and scalability,” says Marcello Maggiora, head of local and geographical networks at the Politecnico.
“Interoperability with our heterogeneous wired environment was also a very important consideration because the wireless network was never meant to be a replacement for the wired network - just a way of extending and expanding it to offer new mobile services.

Secure, mobile, converged networks
After looking at what was available on the market, the workgroup, composed of university staff from the electronics, IT and other departments decided that its key consideration was for industry-leading technology. This was the main reason for choosing the ProCurve Networking Secure Access 700wl series, which supports secure, mobile, convergence-ready networks.

The Politecnico’s WLAN is organised on three different levels and includes two ProCurve Integrated Access Managers 760wl and two ProCurve Access Control Servers 740wl with hundreds of ProCurve 5300xl series switches. Each of these 5300xl switches are equipped with an integrated ProCurve Access Controller Module, enabling a unified wireless and wired user access control in an intelligent edge switch. The high performance core consists of one 10Gb ring and one 2Gb ring based on the ProCurve 9300m Networking Routing Switch.

Design and implementation was achieved with support from specialist ProCurve staff both in Italy and from Grenoble (France) who helped to develop customised solutions
for specific configurations.

“The ProCurve Secure Access 700wl platform represents the core of our wireless network and its flexibility was the key reason why we chose this solution,” says Maggiora. “We can customise the access portals and authorisations and this flexibility with user policies means that we can easily authorise guest users such as conference delegates to access the network for a limited time. We can then go back to the status quo just as easily.

“Another factor is that the network is so easy to access. Users just open their laptops and log on without having to change anything on their interface because the ProCurve solution immediately translates the address that it finds on the laptop. This means that students don’t need the help of support staff to get into the network and that is an important advantage.”

The Politecnico was also impressed by ProCurve’s scalable approach to the crucial aspect of security. This has enabled it to adopt four increasingly stringent security levels. The first is Web-based with students using their own user name and password to gain access. The second is a VPN client based level which involves protection of both user credentials and the data that is transferred. In the higher realms, the third model uses the ProCurve 802.1X protocol port-based access control and the fourth is a ProCurve X509 certification-based protocol.

Another plus point is that ProCurve’s intuitive configuration interface makes the network easy to manage.

Worldwide roaming
To further expand the scope of this project, the Politecnico has set up a partnership with the Italian telephone carrier Telecom Italia and a series of research institutes, which means that when visiting other universities, students or staff can use their laptops to access the network just as if they were on their own campus. This is part of an international project called Eduroam, a RADIUS-based infrastructure that uses ProCurve 802.1X security technology to allow inter-institutional roaming.

The convenience of Eduroam was evident recently when lecturers visiting the Politecnico from Australia could still use their laptops as if they were back at home. “The students are really happy because this wireless network brings the campus closer to what they have seen on US campuses,” added Maggiora. “ProCurve Networking technology offers all the benefits of reliability, security, scalability and simplicity that we wanted from our
wireless network, and its wireless mobility solutions have transformed the way that the university operates. You see students working everywhere, even in a nearby park. Also the lecturers and staff like the flexibility that ProCurve offers because they can move around the buildings and collaborate on projects more easily.”

Why ProCurve Networking?