“We are a large MS campus but there is one thing that needed improvement and that’sDHCP. The Infoblox solution provides us with a redundant DHCP solution. Whenwe implement upgrades with Infoblox, there is no downtime – we can doit in the middle of the day and know there will be no downtime.”
— Kevin Partridge, Senior Systems Engineer at West Chester University
A public, regional, comprehensive institution, West Chester University was founded in 1871. It is the second-largest school in Pennsylvania’s state system of higher education and the fourth-largest university in the Philadelphia area. Ranked among Kiplinger’s 100 best public colleges for its academic quality and affordability, the university is committed to providing access and serving the educational needs of a diverse student body. As of 2010, there are approximately 14,492 degree seeking students enrolled at the university.
West Chester University’s DHCP solution needed redundancy. Additionally, updates to the general operating system required numerous steps and processing simple DHCP changes resulted in unnecessary administrative overhead. Further, use of spreadsheets for IP address management proved insufficient as the university grew and more mobile devices and users required dynamic, real-time and accurate visibility into allocations.
Richard Chan, Network Manager and Assistant Director of Networking and Telecommunications at West Chester University searched for a commercial system to address the reliability, administrative and visibility issues.
Chan and his team evaluated several options and ultimately selected Infoblox because of its reliable IP address management functionality and proven solution redundancy.
“We did look at a few options, but the IP address management with Infoblox was what would provide us the reliability and management tools we needed. Redundancy of DHCP was one of the main reasons we searched for a new solution. The Infoblox IPAM gives network administrators the tools needed to keep all IP services running 24/7 in addition to reducing errors, effort and operational costs,” said Chan.
The university deployed a pair of Infoblox-550 appliances in HA pairs at their primary site running NS1 and unique Infoblox Grid™ technology. The Infoblox Grid technology links a collection of appliances into a unified, centrally-managed platform. Benefits include resilient operations, unified management and real-time, secure, system-wide updates. Infoblox’s easily customizable solutions have made it possible for the university to address all its DHCP and IPAM needs.
As an existing Infoblox NetMRI customer, the university had confidence in the quality and functionality of Infoblox solutions. NetMRI enables automation of network change, visibility into the impact of changes on network health, network configuration management and compliance reporting. Offering physical and virtual appliance deployment options, NetMRI audits multi-vendor infrastructures, identifies anomalies early, speeds resolution and automates network changes. They have been successfully using it for management of the network switches and information on the events.
The university team plans to integrate the two Infoblox solutions from a single graphical user interface (GUI), they can have enterprise-wide visibility into all the layer 2 and 3 devices on the network and to which switch ports they are connected for easy troubleshooting
The Infoblox solution was easy to deploy and simple to upgrade because it eliminates the need to install and manage an operating system on individual devices with its Grid technology and offers an intuitive GUI for easy DNS/DHCP changes and IP address management. Further, the purpose-built appliance approach has inherent security benefits and increases reliability with high availability functionality built-in.
“Today, we have these technologies deployed in each datacenter with high availability benefits,” commented Chan. “We have experienced power issues, but as soon as one goes out, the other unit just picks up seamlessly to avoid service outages.”
Chan’s colleague, Kevin Partridge, Senior Systems Engineer at West Chester University, is the primary administrator of the Infoblox DDI solution and commented, “Infoblox’s one-button updates have saved us lots of maintenance cycles. The Infoblox solution provides us with a redundant DHCP solution so when we implement upgrades with Infoblox, there is no downtime – we can do it in the middle of the day and know there will be no downtime.”
West Chester University of Pennsylvania strives to deploy state of the art technologies that minimize the system outages and downtime.
Second largest school in Pennsylvania’s state system of higher education
DHCP and IPAM
Redundancy in network with current Windows DHCP solution and no standard IP address management solution
Infoblox-550 appliances with NS1 and Infoblox Grid™ technology for:
