avaya case study: university of the sciences

University of the SciencesLeading Health and Life Sciences University relies on Avaya Networking solutions to deliver performance, reliability and business continuity

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – For nearly two centuries, University of the Sciences (USciences) has been preparing students to shape the science of health, offering a wide range of life and health sciences disciplines. The network that supports the school’s approximately 3,000 students and 1,000 staff and faculty members was recently upgraded with products from the Avaya Virtual Services Platform (VSP) 9000 and the Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 ranges. This upgrade delivered significant improvements in network performance, uptime and reliability.

Meeting the Needs of a 21st Century University

Cutting-edge Avaya infrastructure

solutions support increasing

demands on the network

The USciences Information Technology

department faces a challenge common

to most universities – meeting ever-

increasing demands for services and

applications while providing high

network availability.

“Uptime is one of the key issues,”

explains John Masciantonio, executive

director of Information Technology at

USciences. “These days, technology is

considered a utility just like plumbing

and electricity, people are simply not

willing to put up with a lot of outages.

There are also increased demands on the

network due to factors such as the

proliferation of mobile devices, access to

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Challenges• Improve overall

performance and speed of the network

• Add redundancy to the network to ensure business continuity

• Meet increased demands for applications and services

Value Created

Significant

improvements in

network performance:

- Performance from the end points doubled

- Capacity and bandwidth doubled

• Diversified, future-proof network that provides maximum uptime and reliability, will serve University’s needs well into the future

• Dramatically improved support for cloud-based applications, mobile devices and the University’s distance-learning program

• Capacity to seamlessly support newly installed campus VoIP system

the Internet and video-intensive

applications. Add to that the access

incoming students have had to

technology at home and in their high

schools, and universities have a lot to

keep up with.”

Given the advanced age of the

University’s core network,

Masciantonio and his team undertook

an extensive upgrade project with the

goals of achieving the highest

availability possible and diversifying

the network. To that end, they

deployed a solution comprising the

Avaya Virtual Services Platform 9000

and Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch

5500 and 5600 Series products.

“We’ve been looking to diversify our

network for a long time. Our primary

Data Center is in the basement of the

oldest building on campus, so we

needed to get away from a single

point-of-failure,” says Masciantonio.

“The best solution was to move to the

Avaya VSP 9000 platform and

duplicate that at another location on

campus. We also implemented

Avaya’s Switching Cluster technology

so that one catastrophic situation

wouldn’t cripple us.” Switch Clustering

is one of several high-availability,

high-performance, and virtualization-

enabling technologies offered as part

of Avaya’s Virtual Enterprise Network

Architecture (VENA) framework.

Supporting Critical Applications

The network upgrade has been a

boon to several recently deployed

applications, such as the hosted,

cloud-based Blackboard learning

management system. Lecture

Capture is also very popular with

students. It records class sessions and

makes them available to students for

playback. This high-volume video

capture places much greater

demands on the network.

Another driver behind the upgrade is

the sheer amount of wireless devices

on the network - 400-500 students

have Apple iPad devices and almost

all of them have laptops.

USciences also moved to a hybrid IP

Phone system in concert with the

deployment of Avaya VSP 9000, and

as Masciantonio notes, the upgrade

has been critical to the success of the

new VoIP solution. “It all comes back

to uptime and reliability, people

expect to have a phone system

available at all times.”

In addition, USciences is actively

growing its online learning presence

in order to broaden its potential

student base and remain competitive.

The network upgrade will be key in

supporting the increased demands of

the distance-learning program. Often,

online learners are non-traditional

students who are not in close

proximity to the school and are likely

to be doing asynchronous course

work outside of traditional IT support

hours. They could even be in different

parts of the country or the world.

When these students are trying to

access USciences’ resources,

regardless of the time of day, those

resources need to be available,

seamlessly.

A reliable, high-speed, future-

proof network

For Long Le, director of Computing

and Network Services at USciences,

peace of mind is one of the biggest

benefits of the network upgrade. “A

major goal of this upgrade is high-

availability. Adding redundancy to the

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“In networking, there’s

no hiding the bad

news. Success for us is

no complaints, and any

past complaints have

gone away since we

implemented the

Avaya solution.”

—John Masciantonio,

executive director of

Information Technology

at USciences

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network gives us that peace of mind, if anything happens in the

original NOC, the network won’t go down.”

The Avaya Switch Cluster solution has doubled the

performance from the end-points, with each of the 20 campus

buildings doubling its capacity to the core. As Masciantonio

describes, this results in cost savings for the organization.

“We don’t have to implement a separate solution to increase

our network speed, we’ve already accomplished that by

beefing up the core and putting Switch Clustering in place.”

The network upgrade also doubled capacity and increased

bandwidth to 2Gbps per building. And the VSP 9000 is the

only solution on the market that provides active/active cores,

which ensures that all of the available capacity is actively

available, all of the time, maximizing the return on investment.

This solution is also extremely flexible, for example, a

dormitory that has a particularly large number of power users

can now easily be supplied with up to 20Gbps.

Masciantonio reports that traffic on the network has increased

since the upgrade, but there have been no bottlenecks or

performance issues. He adds: “In networking, there’s no hiding

the bad news. Success for us is no complaints, and any past

complaints have gone away since we implemented the Avaya

solution.”

Mark Nestor, USciences CIO, comments, “I am very pleased to

have the Avaya solution in place. The reliability it provides frees

up my time to focus on other, more pressing, issues.”

The university is currently constructing a new building and

implementing new programs, both of which were factors in

the network upgrade. “Future-proofing the network is

definitely something we took into consideration, we wanted a

solution that had a long lifespan that we wouldn’t need to

change out in a couple of years, and we got that with Avaya.”

Learn More

For more information, contact your Avaya Account Manager

or a member of the Avaya Connect channel partner program,

or access other collaterals by clicking on Resource Library at

www.avaya.com.

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USciences Network Simplified w/ Passports

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Griffith Hall Server Farm

USciences Network Simplified w/ VSPs & SMLTs

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http://www.avaya.com

© 2013 Avaya Inc. All Rights Reserved.

All trademarks identified by ®, ™, or SM are registered marks, trademarks, and service marks, respectively, of Avaya Inc.

04/13 • DN7259

ABOUT UNIVERSITY OF THE SCIENCESAt University of the Sciences, students embark on a challenging learning experience

in a proving ground for successful professionals in the science and healthcare-

related fields. A private institution dedicated to education, research, and service,

and distinguished as the nation’s first college of pharmacy, the University has

produced leaders in the science and healthcare marketplaces since its founding in

1821. Students in USciences’ five colleges learn to excel in scientific analysis and to

apply their skills to improving healthcare in the lives of people worldwide through

such disciplines as pharmacy, biology, physical therapy, healthcare business, and

health policy. For more information, visit usciences.edu.

About AvayaAvaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, contact centers, networking and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.

Systems and Applications• Avaya Virtual Services Platform 9000

• Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 range

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http://www.usciences.edu