Widener University Case Study

“Once we got everything set up and delegated the administrative tasks, the box does all the work for us and, our teams are working better together because of the great dashboard – we all have easy access to the network information necessary to do our jobs easily”

— Jason Buttacavoli, Network Administrator, Widener University

The Customer

Widener is an innovative metropolitan university in Chester, Pennsylvania that combinesacademic quality with career preparation and a commitment to community service. Theuniversity’s campuses in Chester, Exton, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington,Delaware, serve some 6,500 students.

The Challenge

Widener has always heavily relied on Microsoft Windows-based servers to support domainname system (DNS) and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) functions. It wasn’t untilthe server unexpectedly crashed that the IT team was prompted to consider other options.

Additional issues that prompted the search for a new solution were time constraints. Theuniversity was pushing updates once a week which could take hours on all the separate servers.And, they found the DHCP functionality to be limited, lacking high availability.

Finally, managing the university’s IPAM also was a nightmare. The university had a team offour in the networking group that were responsible for managing the IP addresses, maintainingrecords manually in a homegrown spreadsheet.

The Solution

Jason Buttacavoli, Network Administrator at Widener University, found Infoblox from a Googlesearch while exploring options. In working with their partner, CNI, the university quickly learnedthat Infoblox was a highly regarded and often recommended solution.

The university selected Infoblox-1050 appliances running NS1 and unique Infoblox Grid™technology. The Infoblox Grid technology links a collection of appliances into a unified, centrallymanagedplatform. Benefits include resilient operations, unified management and real-time,secure, system-wide updates. They also selected Infoblox-550 and -250 appliances to address itsDNS, DHCP and IPAM issues.

Infoblox’s easily customizable solutions have made it possible for Widener to address itsDNS, DHCP and IPAM issues. They were particularly impressed with the Infoblox appliances,central management, Grid technology, easy updates/patching and “one-button” disasterrecovery capability. The Infoblox Grid module links a collection of appliances into a unified,centrally-managed, core network service platform. Benefits include resilient operations, unifiedmanagement and real-time, secure, system-wide updates.

“The dashboard and the GUI is always up on one of the systems and we configured it to showthe main monitoring system for each of the boxes so that we can keep an on eye memory, CPU,etc. We also have a failover association created between the different campuses where wealso monitor the level of utilization – this has been a very useful screen as it lets us know whenanything goes over a certain percentage,” said Buttacavoli.

The Result

The Infoblox solution was easy to deploy and simple to upgrade because it eliminates the needto install and manage an operating system with its Grid™ technology and offers an intuitivegraphical user interface (GUI) for easy DNS and DHCP changes. Further, the purpose-builtappliance approach has inherent security benefits and increases reliability with high availabilityfunctionality built-in.

Improvement has been drastic at the university, especially by adding valuable IPAM functionality.Gone are the days of manually handing out IP addresses while managing them in a spreadsheet.The Infoblox appliances have allowed them to track IP addresses that are given out while trackingit throughout the entire network.

Adds Buttacavoli, “Infoblox is saving us significant time today – at least a couple hours per weekin administration time,” said Buttacavoli. “Once we got everything set up and delegated theadministrative tasks, the box