NEC signs $4 million dollar network refresh with University of New England

Acting as aggregator on behalf of three other vendors, Enterasys, Fortinet and Barracuda, NEC will oversee the replacement of legacy Cisco switches and network infrastructure that has been in place since the university’s last refresh in 1999.

NEC will act as the lead technology partner an provide 24x7 support to the university through its Network Operations Centre, systems design, integration and professional services. Enterasys will supply the university’s network management requirements, while Fortinet will provide Internet security and firewall solutions, and Barracuda the email anti-spam and anti-virus appliances.

“One of the challenges facing Australian universities is the inability to attract skilled network support staff so we place an emphasis on smart use of management software,” said University of England’s principal IT officer, Gordon Smith. “With this NEC led rollout we will now have more time to solve the challenges in life rather than the mundane.”

The network refresh was fuelled by the university’s need for more bandwidth, quality of service (QoS) VoIP and user authentication, Smith said. It will boost the university’s current broadband link of 10 megabits per second to 1 gigabit per second, allowing the campus’s 5000 end-users access to bandwidth intensive applications such as video collaboration and QoS VoIP.

Using standards based rather than proprietary protocols, the solution will also allow for interoperability capabilities across the selected technologies.

Over 350 Cisco data switches and 300 access points will be replaced across the campus. It’s expected to be completed by December.