Managed Services for Enterprise

Enriched by two-and-a-half centuries of tradition in higher education, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is learning an important lesson. To thrive and grow in the centuries going forward requires a non-traditional approach to addressing the university's evolving communication and networking needs. For Rutgers, that means operating the university more like a business by implementing an advanced telecommunications network to serve as the backbone for its business operations and success.

Rutgers is no longer the small colonial college chartered in 1766. Its 29 degree-granting units offer majors in more than 100 fields and thousands of courses. Some 60,000+ Rutgers students, faculty, and staff are geographically dispersed across three campuses. And they all expect seamless access throughout the university-regardless of their location-in pursuit of their activities.

Students registering for classes through a Web application housed on a server in New Brunswick, for example, anticipate the same access to the application during peak registration time even if they are enrolled at Rutgers' Camden or Newark campuses. Faculty members expect to collaborate and share resources across campuses or move jobs to compute clusters and retrieve results without any impediment whatsoever. The fact that Rutgers is a research university adds just another facet of activity on top of everything else.

"We have wired connectivity between campuses, and our challenge was to evolve that connectivity in terms of its capacity and its capability," said Michael Mundrane, Director of Telecommunications, describing Rutgers point-to-point OC-3 architecture. "It lacks flexibility and growth ability, and the one-of-a-kind capacity increases are not self-healing."

With OC-3 and T1 leased long-term contracts expiring, Rutgers seized the opportunity to overcome its existing network constraints and lay the foundation to address future service and technology requirements. Mundrane sought competitive bids to replace the point-to-point links and gave vendors the chance to propose enhanced solutions that included other value-added services.

"Rutgers wanted to run its business operations like a Fortune 500 company would run its business operations-with a state-of-the-art, data networking platform," said Mundrane. "The network solution needed to be robust enough to carry Rutgers' voice, data, and video traffic for its three locations. It had to be secure with high availability and survivability for disaster recovery. The network also needed to be scalable to support current high-bandwidth applications and future growth in applications and locations."

In addition, he sought a cost-effective network solution with a short return on investment and a lower price point per Mbps than a point-to-point OC-3 or T1 solution.

The strong relationships and long history of service with Verizon and Cisco Systems® led to early involvement in Rutgers' network enhancement project. After carefully evaluating customers' requirements, Verizon proposed the E-DSR service-a premium Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) solution based on the Cisco® ONS 15454 Multiservice Provisioning Platform (MSPP).

Rutgers' requirements for a secure, reliable, and survivable network all pointed to a Verizon SONET solution, where the ring architecture provides no single point of failure and the solution quickly becomes even more economical with scale. The need for a high-bandwidth and quickly scalable network pointed to Verizon's next-generation SONET solution, the Enhanced Dedicated SONET Ring (E-DSR) service, which provides Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and scalability to an OC-192 ring.

The university's Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick campuses needed to be interconnected, with each campus optimizing its own bandwidth requirements. Because next-generation SONET supports direct DS1 access to the SONET ring, Rutgers could provide lower bandwidth per port and therefore, only pay for the bandwidth it required at each location.

So Rutgers selected Verizon's bid and turned to its long-term partner to design, install, and manage a secure, reliable, and survivable E-DSR backbone for all of its business operations. Verizon's E-DSR service is built end to end with Cisco equipment and includes the Cisco ONS 15454, which addresses the increasing demand for multiple services, greater transport capacity, networking flexibility, multiple distance options, and management simplicity in a single platform.

This interoperability was important to Rutgers because the university already had a reliable data networking environment based on Cisco equipment. Mundrane found the addition of the Cisco ONS 15454 in the Verizon solution particularly appealing because it gives Rutgers the ability to quadruple its bandwidth and migrate to additional technologies without a complete equipment upgrade in the next five years. The Cisco ONS 15454 also gives Rutgers the flexibility to support T1 to gigabit transmission speeds, all in one box. The convenience of simply pulling out a line card and plugging in a new one instead of actually removing the hardware can represent significant cost savings.

The Verizon E-DSR service also holds the Cisco Powered Network designation for Metro Ethernet LAN extension. Verizon customers like Rutgers know that service providers that display the Cisco Powered Network mark are committed to using end-to-end Cisco equipment in their networks and that they meet high standards of operational excellence and customer support services.

This sort of confidence is critical for businesses that want to outsource all or part of their network operations. Verizon customers are assured that the Cisco Powered Network designated services they use offer high quality, reliability, interoperability, and unsurpassed compatibility with their own enterprise networks built with Cisco equipment.

"After the bidding process was completed, we worked closely with Verizon and Cisco to tailor the solution," said Mundrane. "It was their value-added proposition in the bid process that moved this project forward. They were the only vendors that included a real value-added portion in their bid."

Rutgers is the first university or private institution to implement Verizon's next-generation E-DSR solution. Having a state-of-the-art network to support its business operations and transparent connectivity between campuses and the outside world could provide a competitive edge for attracting high-caliber students, researchers, and faculty. Top-notch technology that offers the latitude to drive high-bandwidth applications may be an added incentive for students to come to Rutgers and for professors to continue their careers there, especially with Rutgers' research emphasis.

"The attractiveness of the SONET ring for the university," stressed Mundrane, "was that we were looking at infrastructure that provided carrier-class bandwidth between the major campus regions. Certainly businesses and others have gone down this road, but educational institutions have typically not followed an enterprise model in a lot of areas.

"The importance of the network is so vital to the university's business of research, teaching, and learning," added Mundrane. "The university recognized that the activities relying on network access and connectivity are so integrated into everything that people are engaged in, that we couldn't simply continue in the old model. We had to think of the university as much more of a business entity."

Mundrane pointed out that satisfying the demand for more bandwidth was not the primary driver for this decision. "We could have purchased larger point-to-point links," he noted. "What really drove this is that wide-area connectivity between these major campus locations is a critical, strategic asset of the university. This infrastructure is simply engrained in all of the activity that's taking place. It's assumed that it will be there, and that it will be done correctly."

Tom Mangano, Corporate Account Manager for Verizon, said the E-DSR solution based on the Cisco ONS 15454 platform was an extremely cost-effective way to provide both disaster recovery and scalability to support the growing university. For about the same initial cost of adding bandwidth via point-to-point links with no redundancy, Rutgers will gain a secure, reliable network with no single point of failure-proactively monitored and backed by Verizon and Cisco. Traffic can be carried around the other side of the ring, providing built-in disaster recovery. The ring is self-healing, offering greater protection against an accident.

Since the private SONET OC-48 ring will be used only by Rutgers, the university can add point-to-point long distance to its other campus locations at a reduced price. The biggest savings, however, will be realized when the university adds bandwidth in the future. Initially, only about one-quarter of the SONET ring will be provisioned.

"Rutgers wasn't looking at this SONET ring from just day one-the university was looking at the bigger picture five years down the road and realized that in order to save money, they had to spend a little money," said Mangano. "The more high-bandwidth applications Rutgers puts on this ring, the more the scales will tip in their favor in terms of cost savings. If Rutgers did not have a ring in place, and the university wanted to grow and provide more applications that would be at a much higher cost than adding high-bandwidth circuits on their own network, where Rutgers can add them for a fraction of the cost."

Mundrane realized that if he looked just at a straight replacement cost of Rutgers' point-to-point solution, there wouldn't be any cost savings, because Rutgers prepaid for the ring in the Verizon E-DSR solution. "But that perspective wouldn't take growth into consideration," said Mundrane. "We've prepaid for the ring. Now adding bandwidth is inexpensive and it's a quick break-even point. We won't have to add much bandwidth before we save money. And we were looking at more-there is value to be placed on looking at diversity, redundancy, and self-healing. All that has a value."

Rutgers' mission includes instruction, research, and service to the community. Accessing and sharing information are key components of this mission and often require high-bandwidth and secure connectivity. The Verizon E-DSR solution will give Rutgers a robust, highly available SONET network connecting each major campus region, capable of supporting high-bandwidth applications and providing Rutgers' students and faculty the tools they need to learn and to communicate.

In the near future, Mundrane expects to see a greater penetration of the applications already being used in the community, rather than the emergence of a major new high-bandwidth application at Rutgers. Advances in video technology, for example, are bringing the cost and complexity of using this high-bandwidth application down to where the use of video will become more prevalent. An aggregation of many applications-such as videoconferencing, video on demand, distance learning, and voice over IP-will continue to drive bandwidth.

As these applications permeate university environments, and as standard yet critical business processes continue to migrate to the network, higher education's perspective will need to change, according to Mundrane. "In the past, networking has historically been experimental, permeated by early adopters. Today, the network is a true production infrastructure that's critical to the operations of any university." [see Figure 1].