Ferrum College Scales Up its Computer Networking System to New Levels of Service, Security, and Reliability
For immediate release:
August 21, 2008
August 21, 2008
Contact: Natalie Faunce, (540) 365-4301
nfaunce@ferrum.edu
nfaunce@ferrum.edu
Ferrum College has chosen Juniper Networks Inc, a high-performance network infrastructure, to rebuild its entire campus-wide network with Juniper switching, network access control (NAC) and firewall/VPN solutions. Ferrum selected Juniper to meet the demanding network requirements posed by exceptional growth in student enrollment, and to enable the college to extend 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) throughput across the network in support of advanced Voice over IP (VoIP) by fall 2009.
Enrollment has grown significantly in the past five years at Ferrum College, and this trend is expected to continue. New academic programs, the addition of an experiential 3-week term, new residence halls, and renovated classrooms have all escalated demands on the campus-wide network infrastructure from students, faculty, and staff. The college's expansion has also heightened the technology security concerns posed by a plethora of student personal communications devices.
"To keep pace with and manage our growth, we're increasing our delivery of online course materials to support continuous learning, augmenting our learning management solutions, and plan to deploy voice-over-IP next year," said Dr. Christine Stinson, chief information officer of Ferrum College. "Our selection of Juniper Networks to replace our existing network infrastructure was driven by Juniper's ability to improve network performance, improve reliability and decrease maintenance costs in line with our continued expansion."
The Juniper Networks EX 4200 and EX 3200 series switches, chosen for their high throughput, open interoperability and lower energy consumption, will serve as the backbone of the new Ferrum College network. The Juniper Networks EX-series switches' ability to support a full 15.4 watts of Class 3 Power over Ethernet (PoE) on all 48 ports (versus 24 ports in competing switches) was "one of the most important items" in Ferrum's decision, according to Stinson. "Other switches have software that helps moderate power usage, and can be enhanced with subsequent hardware purchases, but the Juniper switches will meet our expected VoIP needs right out of the box, while consuming 15-30 percent less power than the competition."
"Today's students depend on an increasingly diverse collection of networked devices as part of their campus and learning environment," Stinson said. "Juniper's integration of security into their solutions-'from the inside, out'-helps us balance the heavily increasing demand for network access with rigorous policies for maintaining network security."
Ferrum College also faces increasing demand for differing network access privileges for different users. "With our old, un-segmented network, ensuring unified and secure access has proven difficult," Stinson said. "Moreover, if one element of the network goes down, it all goes down. Juniper's modular architecture, based upon JUNOS software, will bring us the reliability, resilience and maintenance we require to scale our network in line with our growth."
For more information about Ferrum’s networking system contact Christine Stinson at 365-4311 or cstinson@ferrum.edu.
About Ferrum College
Ferrum College is a four-year, private, co-educational, liberal arts college affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Ferrum offers a choice of nationally recognized bachelor’s degree programs at a cost well below the national average for private colleges.
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