Abertay University

Challenge

Abertay University, located in the centre of Dundee, Scotland, is a modern university with a long history. Founded as Dundee Technical Institute in 1888 to provide the skills needed by the city’s industry and commerce, it has been producing highly talented graduates for over 125 years. It was the first academic institution in the world to offer a ‘computer games’ degree in 1997 and remains a leader in this field.

In common with universities across the country, Abertay’s new generations of students now expect high levels of internet connectivity to be available at all times. This, coupled with more collaborative ways of teaching, has put a huge strain on its IT infrastructure. To meet these new demands, the University has undergone an “ICT Transformation” programme which has completely refreshed its network infrastructure. Its challenge in doing this has been to deliver what students and staff need now and in the future, within a limited budget.

Solution

After looking at all the available options, it quickly became clear to Abertay University that Huawei was able to demonstrate a leadership in networking up to 100 Gb which offered the best and most cost- effective solution for the institution.

Working through JANET (Joint Academic NETwork), a government- funded organisation that provides and develops network infrastructure to meet the needs of the UK’s research and education communities, Huawei provided Abertay with a 40Gb core network made up of a mix of core and edge switches that could deliver the bandwidth and scalability the University was looking for. Now it can offer everyone on campus speeds of up to 10Gb,as standard.

The network’s resilient design, coupled with the way the hardware is configured has also ensured a very high degree of availability.

Value

The world of higher education in the UK has become a lot more competitive over the last few years and universities are having to work a lot harder to attract the students they need to remain successful. With its particular expertise in IT, it’s doubly important for Abertay University to be able to offer the very best IT facilities. With its new Huawei-based network offering users high-performance and reliable connectivity, its confident it’ll be able to do just that well into the foreseeable future.

The University was also very keen to deploy a ‘green’ solution, an aspiration that Huawei products more than live up to. With energy-saving technologies such as green chipset, multi-zone cooling and auto fan speed control, industry reviews have shown Huawei switches to have a 63 per cent lower power consumption per port compared with other similar solutions. And with the ability to manage everything using the Huawei eSight platform, it’s been possible to reduce ongoing running costs and improve operational efficiency through the quicker deployment and expansion of networks, real-time measurement of network quality and the resolution of problems long before they affect users.