Managed Services for Enterprise

St. Petersburg College was founded in 1927, as a private, non-profit community college in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. Today more than 20,000 students attend classes in person at ten learning sites throughout Pinellas County, Florida. When counting attendance via the College's online, televised, and teleweb course offerings, actual enrollment numbers more than 70,000 students. When it comes to providing greater educational opportunity for students, St. Petersburg College lets nothing stand in its way - not limited academic budgets, not distance between sites, and certainly not inadequate technology.

The College leadership has always aggressively used technology to further its mission. Until 2001, it was a two-year, community college, ranked in the top 10 nationally for awarding Associate degrees. In 2001, the College became accredited for offering Bachelor's degrees in Education, Nursing and Technology Management and for providing access to Bachelor degree programs at partnering four-year institutions. Converting from a two-year college to a four-year program placed new requirements on the College's information systems and network. The existing ERP system had to be upgraded to accommodate new registration processes and fee structures. Increasing computing power at the desktop was straining the school's legacy ATM technology-based network. And ever on the alert for ways to improve the educational experience, the College was adding web-based courses and interactive, videoconferencing-based classes at multiple locations. Plans for IP communications applications were close behind.

Not only did the College need a network that could technologically cope with high bandwidth requirements, latency-sensitive traffic such as voice and video demanded the ability to assure high Quality of Service (QoS). Online course delivery meant that the network must enable concurrent access by up to 15,000 students at any given time and still deliver high performance. And of course, students often work, register for classes, and access school resources at all hours of the night, so 24-hour-a-day application availability was imperative.

Other must-haves included security to protect student records as well as to secure the network itself. Scalability was also critical as plans include increasing online and teleweb offerings over time and adding locations. The College also wanted to provide state-of-the-art networking technology to a new facility that would offer courses in technology management, as well as provide co-location for county economic development agencies. However, given the budget limitations that all institutions of higher education face, St. Petersburg College also needed a cost-effective solution that would reduce its total cost of ownership. After reviewing solutions from other vendors and service providers, only Time Warner Telecom and Cisco Systems could provide the advanced technology solution that the College needed to assure that its network would be able to scale to meet future challenges.

"I wanted partners who are leaders," explained Conferlet Carney, Vice President Information Systems. "In addition to meeting our aggressive goals within a limited budget, we want our clients to know that we're partnering with the leaders in networking and in data communications. That's why we chose Cisco Systems and Time Warner Telecom."

In less than four months, Time Warner Telecom installed fiber to ten St. Petersburg College locations, connecting them all over a resilient gigabit optical ring. The College's remote sites are connected over the ring using Time Warner Telecom's managed Ethernet Internet Service (EIS) and Time Warner Telecom Metro Ethernet NLAN service. Ten 100-megabit ports are installed at each college site, and within the ring, St. Petersburg has designated different levels of connectivity between locations, based on need. Depending on the applications running between each location, network capacity is prioritized for video, Internet, back-office, and voice traffic.

Cisco Catalyst 3550 Series Metro Ethernet switches are located at each location, delivering traffic to Cisco 7609 Series routers located in Time Warner Telecom's central office. To enhance security, one additional back-up link for Internet traffic connects a back-up site in Clearwater with the Time Warner Telecom central office. To assure high availability, Cisco rapid spanning tree technology can instantly switch traffic around outages.

"St. Petersburg College needed high bandwidth within a budget," said Rich Santoro, vice president and general manager of Time Warner Telecom in Tampa, Florida. "Our flexible backbone solution and managed services offering gave the College the varying capacity levels they needed with scalability built in if and when they need it. Combined with our managed services offering, we could provide the College with a very nice data solution."

Advanced networking technologies from Cisco provide St. Petersburg College with the accessibility, security, and flexibility needed to assure students, faculty and administrators with secure access to information and communication tools anytime, anywhere. As St. Petersburg continues to transform the traditional educational experience, its Cisco Metro Ethernet solution enables it to continue to innovate with online and interactive course offerings.

Carney also chose Cisco IP Communications solutions for the new facility, which allows him to converge voice traffic over the Cisco IP network in that facility. Cisco Call Manager provides call routing and a Cisco VG248 voice gateway integrates with the campus's multivendor PBX switches. The ability to simply plug in phones to computers and easily handle adds, moves, and changes is an extra benefit. Cisco Unity™ Unified Messaging allows users to receive voice messages in their Microsoft Outlook e-mail boxes for easy accessibility.

"During the transition from the ATM network to the Ethernet network with Time Warner Telecom, there were no complaints and no calls about service disruption," said Carney. "And in two years since, I have never had a call from our technicians saying that our site is down because of equipment failure. True story. That's one of the things I like the most. I'm very confident with the Cisco equipment."

Adds Santoro, "the only call we received was during hurricane Charlie, when a falling tree knocked out a splice box. It affected two campuses for about four hours. But the light signal was never interrupted - it was actually intensified so we had to reset the Cisco switch to read the light intensity and the network came right back up. The Cisco equipment is very reliable." By implementing Cisco rapid spanning tree technology, St. Petersburg also met its need for high availability. If a link drops anywhere in the optical ring, within a sub-second traffic is automatically re-routed.

Carney is measuring cost-effectiveness in many ways - the first being scalability. Now when St. Petersburg adds more sites, users, or applications to its network, it scales seamlessly without having to make hardware changes, which enables the College to keep its costs within budget. Recurring costs are low for two reasons. First, Cisco equipment has proved its high reliability (even through four hurricanes), which saves the College money associated with problem identification, isolation, and resolution. Second, the flexibility and high performance of Time Warner Telecom's managed services offering makes it highly cost effective for Carney.

"It's very reasonable," he said. "Time Warner Telecom's gigabit Ethernet service allows us to grow without adding substantial cost." Carney also likes the innovation that Cisco and Time Warner Telecom bring to the partnership. For example, the Cisco IP Communications solution installed in the new facility integrated with all of the existing campus PBX systems. Users can continue to dial between campuses using four-digit dialing - making it unnecessary to re-train or convert existing processes. Voicemails are accessible through the phone or on the user's computer. Voice activation and advanced telephony conferencing features will automate many manual processes for the College.

Continuing its heritage of being an institution of higher education with cutting-edge technology, St. Petersburg will continue to expand services and extend IP Communications solutions through its campuses.

"We wanted to go with leaders," explains Carney. "That's why we chose Cisco Systems and as we expand our services out into the community, we expect Time Warner Telecom to be right there with us as well."

To find out more about Cisco routing solutions, go to www.cisco.com/go/routing

To find out more about Cisco switching solutions, go to: www.cisco.com/go/switching

To find out more about Cisco IP Communications solutions, go to: www.cisco.com/go/ipc

To find out more about Cisco Metro Ethernet solutions, go to: www.cisco.com/go/metro

To find out more about Cisco managed services solutions, go to: www.cisco.com/go/managedservices

To find out more about Time Warner Telecom, Inc., go to: www.twtelecom.com

To find out more about St. Petersburg College, go to: www.spjc.edu