The Client
University of Dayton
The Challenge
The University of Dayton (UD) was very fortunate to have an extremely fiber-rich physical plant. Unfortunately, the campus data network was segmented, according to function, into two primary VLANS—students and staff. Network performance was severely degraded by allowing so many machines to talk on essentially the same wire. Given the fact that VLANS were not designed to grow to nearly this vast size and to accommodate future growth, a total network redesign was needed from the ground up. At the same time, an effort was made to recover as many legal Internet addresses as possible of the University’s entire class B allotment. Haverstick needed to increase performance and reliability while making the network more efficient overall. To add to the complexity, minimal downtime was a must, as many essential systems such as fire, access card, campus food service, life safety, and public safety cameras depend on and communicate through the campus data network.
- Improved performance; identify and remove problematic areas of the network infrastructure; evaluate all systems for possible performance gains
- Increased reliability; design redundant backend systems to improve business continuity in the event of a system failure
- Expanded scalability; design a system that would allow the customer to grow at will, without concern for its technology platform
- Leverage existing investments in information technology infrastructure and minimize additional expense
The Haverstick Approach
Haverstick’s infrastructure team met with UD’s data architecture staff to get an idea of exactly what expectations needed to be met and in what priority. After a general project plan was laid out and end-result goals were established, we proceeded to ask other key personnel such as the University’s security officer, CIO and assistant CIO what end goals they would like to achieve. Everyone involved agreed that the network performance in the past was poor and the reliability was lackluster at best.
Haverstick devised the following approach to reaching the end goals:
- Stabilize existing equipment to prevent any further network degradation.
- Install two new redundant core routers to replace a single point of failure.
- Replace legacy distribution and access equipment that had reached end-of-life.
- Reallocate and recover campus-wide Internet address scheme.
- Initiate layer-three routing at the distribution layer of design.
- Maximize existing fiber by upgrading interbuilding links to Gigabit Ethernet.
In addition to the above stated design enhancements, we also focused on the following:
- Moved all nonpublic services to a private 10.0.0.0 network IP scheme
- Retooled campus-wide security policy concerning infrastructure equipment
- Upgraded firewalls to multi-processor support to increase performance
The Result
University of Dayton now has a reliable data network that everyone can depend on. As they move forward in their initiatives, they want to be the leader in technology. This has been echoed by initiatives such as mandatory laptops for every student (not just incoming ones) at the start of the 2002 fall semester. UD also has a very diverse and complex wireless network. Many systems, such as the wireless network, rely heavily on the wired network for their services.
They have a tremendous amount of bandwidth to spare and much room for future growth. All of this was accomplished while recovering over 40 percent of the university’s address space and increasing security to an unprecedented level. | 
