London School Of Hygiene And Tropical Medicine Fighting Fit After £500k Investment In New Foundry Networks Technology
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London School Of Hygiene And Tropical Medicine Fighting Fit After £500k Investment In New Foundry Networks Technology
• Expenditure on networking part of a major capital investment programme
• Foundry’s high performance PoE VoIP-ready switches to support
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the School’s research teaching and training activities for at least 5 years
• Foundry establishes a dominant position in higher education with a client base of over 25 UK institutions
LONDON – (June 14 2007) - Foundry Networks® Inc. (NASDAQ: FDRY)
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a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing today announced that The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) has completed a project to completely refresh the organisation’s network infrastructure at its main Keppel Street campus in Bloomsbury using its latest BigIron® and FastIron® Ethernet switch technology. This will provide a robust high performance and scalable platform for all the School’s research teaching and training needs for at least the next 5 years. The project worth approximately £500k was completed by Foundry partner Matrix Communications.
Founded in 1899 LSHTM’s focus is to improve health worldwide through research postgraduate teaching advanced training and informing policy and practice. Its activities involve three key areas and departments – Epidemiology and Population Health Infectious and Tropical Diseases and Public Health and Policy. Internationally recognised as one of the leading institutions in its field with HRH Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh as its patron LSHTM staff have been instrumental in finding the link between smoking and lung cancer and between mosquitoes and malaria. With revenue of £63.4 million LSHTM today has 740 staff and 2420 students - 865 of whom are London-based the remainder comprising those on distance learning courses.
Network infrastructure has been installed in two key phases with a third forthcoming. For the first Foundry was chosen as the vendor of choice in 2003 when a new seven-storey building extension at the Keppel Street site – the North Courtyard - was completed creating much needed office space.
Sheena Wakefield LSHTM’s head of IT services explains: “Back then we were looking for a partner for the initial North Courtyard project one who we hoped would support us in the long-term for a complete network refresh project which we expected to do later when more funding was available. We chose Foundry on the basis of technical merit value for money and a product roadmap which we knew would support us over time. They also had good references and expertise in working with the higher education sector.”
The main project - phase two - has seen investment in a brand new data centre and the complete replacement of old network technology at the main Keppel Street site with two BigIron RX-16 backbone switches – linked for resilience – along with 18 FastIron SuperX edge switches.
The new SuperX switches are Power over Ethernet-ready (PoE) which was important to LSHTM in the context of expanding its Mitel VoIP solution and rolling out wireless access points and CCTV cameras in select buildings without needing to buy extra switches or external power supplies.
Wakefield says “In-built PoE gives us the potential for cost savings. In addition the BigIron RX and FastIron SuperX series switches provide us with much needed flexibility and capacity as well as including sFlow traffic analysis technology. This allows us to drill down really quickly to monitor traffic patterns on the network and respond rapidly to any abnormal issues.”
The completion of the second phase has been a far more complex project than the first which involved provisioning the North Courtyard building with new switches. As well as installing all the hardware it has entailed a move from Layer 2 to Layer 3 switching and the creation of virtual LANs (VLANs) throughout the School. Wakefield explains “It wasn’t a simple replacement job
