Right-Sizing the Right Solution – Building a Flexible Core Network for Future ICT Challenges

As the University of Tasmania is the only higher education institute in Tasmania, it simultaneously provides a broad spread of undergraduate and teaching disciplines, as well as a strong multi-discipline research presence, especially in unique theme areas particularly related to our southern latitudes. It also finds itself in the situation of having a high level of interaction and collaboration with many state and federal government agencies. Many of these arrangements result in a sharing of facilities and resources.
It was deemed that during a recent network refresh that a more flexible and sophisticated “service provider” style network would be advantageous to provide a secure and scalable core and WAN network, hence enabling the University to enhance the network scalability, features and security posture when dealing with a mixed environment of end users, organisations and partners. This would also enable the University to separate and treat its own unique groups of end users with differing levels of service and security needs in a robust and practical manner.
This presentation will cover the issues being experienced, how a service provider style MPLS network is addressing those issues, and the subsequent benefits being experienced.
This process also saw the start of a move away from the long standing single vendor approach, to a more open multi-vendor network, using products from multiple vendors more finely tuned and suited for an organisation of UTAS size and geographical displacement. The processes involved in this decision, the evaluation processes, implementation issues, the solution and the benefits of implementing a HP networking solution for an MPLS Core/WAN will also be discussed.
Finally a roadmap will be presented for how this new network will provide the foundation for the University core ICT functions in a dynamic and complex ICT environment with ever-changing needs, and to allow both openness and collaboration, whilst simultaneously being able to protect critical assets, all on a common shared network infrastructure.