Dundee University has begun a £6m
upgrade of its entire network and is using
asset-tracking software to manage the upgrade and ensure
resilience.
With 21,000 users comprising staff and students spread over four
campuses, the university has embarked on a complete refresh of more
than 600 switches and 300 access points.
With more than 14,000 port connections running on its network,
Dundee University needed to ensure reliability under the new
architecture, as prior to the upgrade the IT department found that
occurrences of downtime were rising.
The incidents of downtime resulted from network switches causing
single points of failure. A rising demand for services had
exacerbated the problem.
High profile departments such as medicine and life sciences
conduct research costing millions of pounds at the university, so
ensuring high availability for them was a priority.
"It could take hours to locate the problem switch, get a
replacement and then configure the new switch to perform the same
functions," said Vinesh Chandra, networking specialist for the
university.
"Our biggest problem was determining what equipment we had
running on the network, what it was connected to and how it was
configured, as well as the knock-on effects of making any changes
to services."
Reconfiguring switches - for instance, when new students joined
- meant that network administrators had to locate hard copy
documentation to find what each switch did and its set-up details.
This paper-based system was difficult to maintain in a useful
way.
The university responded by deploying
iTracs monitoring software to map the physical connections and
equipment. The software also allowed an insight into the
university's network so that, in the event of a failure, problem
points could be identified more quickly.
Replacement switches could also be configured to a database that
holds all set-up information about devices running on the
network.
"With this visibility of the network we have reduced the amount
of man hours we would have spent addressing problems," said
Chandra.
However, he noted that transcribing information about what each
component on the network did from hard copy into the iTracs system
took more than three months, and that the magnitude of this task
should not be underestimated in larger deployments.
Jean-Pierre Garbani, a research vice-president at Forrester,
said the move away from paper-based documentation about network
configurations to dedicated configuration management databases was
an emerging trend, as network managers try to gain a more
comprehensive view of their infrastructure.
"Gaining transparency into the network assets and how they are
configured is a key ingredient of service management," he said.
"We find that the configuration management database is a
work-in-progress among companies, and that the implementations
currently available - while making considerable progress toward
service management - are only a partial response to user
needs."
Garbani said that having a repository of information was only
the beginning of the process, and that IT departments must
implement policies to ensure that this information is kept current,
and that when new equipment is installed, it is installed in line
with policies.
"Having configuration management databases can be helpful, but
if businesses carry on adding equipment regardless, and without
conducting impact analysis on services, then this could undermine
the benefits of having a clear view of the network," Garbani
said.
Without a clear view of the network, businesses can overspend on
the network. According to Gartner, IT departments will waste an
estimated £50m over the next five years by overspending on network
expansion plans.
Mark Fabbi, a research vice-president and distinguished analyst
at Gartner, said that companies need to optimise network
infrastructures to ensure that they deliver proposed benefits.
"Enterprises are continuing to follow bad practices, such as not
auditing their network environments and determining what equipment
they have, and how their equipment maps to delivering services," he
said.
Research conducted by Gartner discovered that having poor audit
information of the network leads to bad network design, and that
70% of companies will be at a competitive business disadvantage
because they do not have the information available to manage and
update their infrastructure appropriately.
Fabbi said that to run their networks successfully, companies
must know what applications and business processes are running on
the network, rather than building a generic network and increasing
its size when demand for services rises.
NHS trust
upgrades its network >>
Dundee University breakthrough could slash production costs
>>
Networks: planning for success >>
Dundee University
>>
iTracs >>
Comment on this article:
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk