Campus IT News

Vancouver CC Revamps Network Infrastructure

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/04/10

Vancouver Community College has completed a deployment of Enterasys network solutions in a 60,000 square-foot health sciences educational facility on the college's main campus.

Prior to the deployment of the new gear, the IT infrastructure gear was, according to Ben Guanzon, director of IT, "growing increasingly difficult and costly to manage. The network was impeding the ability to reliably deliver applications to our staff and students."

Guanzon and his team evaluated several network vendors and ultimately chose Enterasys based on several features, including network manageability, interoperability with existing wireless access points, support for voice over IP (voIP), security, and quality of support. Guanzon said that the network management capability and support offered by Enterasys was "untouchable" by other vendors. "We have been consistently impressed with the time, money, and resources we've saved in the day-to-day management of the network since going with Enterasys."

The network installation, which included replacement of 130 network switches, consists of Enterasys C-Series switches that connect and prioritize traffic for all IT services, including building-wide VoIP telephony, streaming video for the nursing training labs, and wireless access points for student and faculty mobility.

"Our Enterasys network has allowed us to completely reverse the previous ratio of spending 80 percent of our daily routine responding to network problems and 20 percent on new projects," Guanzon said. "Now, we are far more proactive and focus on planning and implementing new projects rather than reacting to complaints or switch failures."