Extreme Networks in Higher Education: smart solutions for our collective future

With the transition to smart campus in higher education, the need for highly reliable and easily-managed networks has never been greater. Universities and colleges are following various IT & infrastructure strategies, focused on engaging students and empowering staff. For many organizations, addressing these challenges comes at a "price" of an increasingly complex and distributed IT environment.

That was the case for Université libre de Bruxelles, one of the largest and best research universities in Belgium. The consistent growth of the ULB’s network inevitably led to an increasingly convoluted management and burdensome manual tasks. The use of end-to-end fiber and microswitches eventually became too complex to implement and maintain.

One field-proven way to simplify the network management is to add more automation to facilitate monitoring, troubleshooting and – most importantly – provisioning. This is why ULB decided to design and implement a more efficient network with an automated management based on the Extreme Fabric Connect technology.

"The solution is based on the SPB (Shortest Path Bridging) standard, and therefore offers a much more dynamic management for complex networks. You can add switch to a stack without interfering or reconfiguring or having to establish a fiber connection. Just plug in any network device you want and it will be automatically assigned to a VLAN or the shortest path", Claude Lepoivre, System Engineering Manager at Extreme Networks explains.

Today everything and everyone needs to be connected and the same goes for the education environments. Since connectivity becomes a critical requirement, another challenge is to keep the network resilient and secure with, more often than not, limited resources at your disposal.

With the adoption of the scalable, software-defined Fabric based solution from Extreme, the ULB’s network gained not only an effortless management for a small team, but a full redundancy and high availability in a critical environment to boot.

"Between the different buildings, we have developed redundant connections, each time managed via SPB", explains Thierry Frère, Network Service Director at Université libre de Bruxelles. "Our goal is to free as much time of our IT department as possible, allowing us to focus on value-added activities for our students and researchers while offering a stable, efficient and secure network managed by a small team", Karin Doguet, CIO of ULB adds.

One of the biggest challenges of IT teams in the education sector is of course network security, and that only became more apparent with the pandemic and the consequent need to provide secure networks for remote learning.

For example, ULB needed to take care of the IP addresses use. Being IP-centric, its conventional legacy topology could have been very easily mapped. It’s a double-edged sword, because a setup like this simplifies network management, but at the same time provides an apt opportunity for hackers to attack. Extreme Fabric Connect’s ability to use Virtual Routing & Forwarding (VRF) technology to support multi-tenancy and network segmentation with fully segmented routing tables allowed to solve that problem.

"We are now working with dynamic IP addresses via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. It is not only smoother, but also much more secure", Karin Doguet explains.

"Extreme Fabric Connect delivers significant differentiation, when it comes to network visibility and traffic transparency. The solution creates an inherently secure network that can be segmented into secure zones, providing increased protection for mission critical services and systems – easily and at scale", says Claude Lepoivre.

"For example, access control, surveillance cameras and IP telephony are now in a specific segment. These elements are separated from the users' internet traffic, which goes through another segment", says Thierry Frère.

What’s more, network teams working in educational institutions can extend Fabric Connect right to the edge of the network. This extension brings about a zero-touch and a zero-trust network edge by combining the automation enabled through auto-sense ports, with both the security and automation enabled by RADIUS or Network Access Control.

"Edge equipment that connects to the network, whether a computer, printer, camera, or any other device, will receive authorization and settings automatically and the connection will be protected at the highest security levels", says Shlomo Blanka, IT Director at the Kibbutzim College of Education, one of the largest and most innovative education hubs in Israel, which also decided to take advantage of Extreme Fabric Connect.

Technology changes the way universities and colleges compete with each other to recruit and retain students in order to maintain, or increase their reputation and revenue, with the rise of e-sports initiatives being one of the most brighter examples. But as the technology continues to develop at an increasing rate, so do the challenges for connectivity.

That was the case for Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam, the largest and most innovative creative college in the Benelux region. GLR faced the growing challenge of mobility, where students, staff and administration users want to increasingly learn, teach and work with a diverse mix of devices from anywhere on, and off campus. This translated into a need for a reliable, secure and efficient wireless network.

“Given the density of our environment and its bandwidth-hungry applications, we opted for the next generation Wi-Fi 6. Data rates up to 4.8 Gbps, dual 5 GHz, dedicated dual-band threat sensor, dual power supply – we chose Extreme again because we knew we can expect reliability”, says Sander Stolk, the Security Officer and Board Member at GLR.

Extreme Campus Controller, which enables the GLR’s wired and wireless orchestration, could be described as a hybrid cloud management appliance. With AP410C, the first generation of access points to run multiple Extreme operating systems, the Dutch college also gained flexibility and choice between on-premise or potential future cloud deployment.

It is no secret that today’s rapidly evolving higher education organizations require flexible, agile, scalable and intelligent networking solutions that support both present and future needs. Extreme Networks solutions checks all these boxes with: