HP ProCurve Networking - Casos de clientes

	HP ProCurve Networking: University of the South—Providing Wireless to Increase Student and Faculty Satisfaction
	“As a prestigious university, we are committed to providing our students and faculty with the most advanced technology available today. The 802.11n wireless standard shows a lot of promise in increasing productivity and performance and we look forward to using this technology in our new state-of-the-art science center.” Geno Schlichting, Communications Specialist, University of the South

The University of the South, known familiarly as “Sewanee,” is located on 10,000 acres atop the Cumberland Plateau between Nashville and Chattanooga, Tenn. The university serves more than 1,500 undergraduate and graduate students and has graduated 25 Rhodes Scholars—a record that is unmatched by all but a handful of institutions.

Like many universities, the University of the South provided its students, faculty, and community members with a wireless network, letting them easily access e-mail, the Internet, and other applications from a range of locations around campus. When the university’s wireless network provider went out of business, the school needed to find a new solution and saw an opportunity to improve upon its old system.

Objective

Finding a Grade-A WLAN
The University of the South had exact specifications for a new wireless network. “With our broad, sprawling campus and stone buildings that are more than a century old, it’s easy for our infrastructure costs to skyrocket. We needed to find a wireless solution that could provide us with several deployment options to contain these costs,” said Geno Schlichting, University of the South communications specialist.

These deployment options included finding a solution with flexible traffic processing capabilities that allowed the school to centralize certain WLAN traffic for security, while other traffic is forwarded by intelligent access points at the edge of the network for optimum performance. The ideal solution would also provide access control features so the school could segment faculty, student, and guest traffic. Single- and dual-radio access point configurations were required for maximum coverage across campus. Finally, the solution would need to provide an easy and cost-effective upgrade to the new 802.11n wireless standard. In addition to these requirements, the university wanted a solution that would be easy to use and manage. After an extensive evaluation of several wireless LAN providers, the University of the South selected HP ProCurve* as their wireless network provider.

Approach

University of the South Graduates to an HP ProCurve Wireless Network
The University of the South found that HP ProCurve not only offered all of the features it required, but the solution also performed much better than the competing solutions. HP ProCurve also has a successful track record of deployments in the education market and came with high recommendations.

HP ProCurve access points are currently in place across a range of residence, academic, and support buildings on campus. The university has deployed 70 HP ProCurve MultiService Access Points and one HP ProCurve MultiService Controller, and anticipates deploying up to 170 access points across 80–90 buildings once the installation is complete.

The single- and dual-radio MultiService Access Points offer “plug and play” and centralized management features. Once deployed, the access points securely and automatically connected to the HP ProCurve MultiService Controller, which allows the university to manage the access points from a single location.

“HP ProCurve is ideal for the way our campus is laid out,” said Schlichting. “We have several houses on the fringes of campus that would have been very expensive to connect to the network, but HP ProCurve allows us to get them onto our network wirelessly.”

HP ProCurve allows the university to easily connect its residence halls, academic buildings, and support buildings to the wireless network, especially those that are harder to wire because of their age or remote location. The HP ProCurve WLAN also provides the school with a technology that allows it to attract new students and faculty because it offers valuable amenities.

The University of the South is currently evaluating the HP ProCurve RF Manager, which detects security vulnerabilities in the school’s network. In addition, the university will soon start using the HP ProCurve Visitor Management Tool (VMT) to provide guest access. “Our school is in the center of the town of Sewanee, so the town residents are extremely valuable to our school community,” said Schlichting. “We are currently in the process of figuring out how to provide them with access to the wireless network. Thankfully, HP ProCurve lets us easily configure guest access with the VMT.” The University of the South plans to deploy HP ProCurve’s new 802.11n access points at the new science center on campus to enable faster connection speeds. By deploying the HP ProCurve MultiService Access Points, the university will enjoy more than five times the performance of current wireless networks, but without the disruptive upgrades that users of other wireless LAN solutions will need to undergo.

“As a prestigious university, we are committed to providing our students and faculty with the most advanced technology available today,” said Schlichting. “The 802.11n wireless standard shows a lot of promise in increasing productivity and performance and we look forward to using this technology in our new state-of-the-art science center.”

* The products referred to in this publication were developed and sold by Colubris Networks Inc, which was acquired by HP ProCurve in 2008. References to HP ProCurve herein refer only to Colubris Networks Inc. or those products acquired from Colubris Networks and not the HP ProCurve product line generally.