Networking & Wireless | News
St. Petersburg College Modernizes Network Infrastructure
St. Petersburg College in Florida plans to modernize its network infrastructure to support an increasing number of applications and users.
The college's IT infrastructure supports five campuses with an increasing number of students and a growing distance learning program that serves 32,000 students each semester. It also supports a wide variety of campus-wide applications, including Blackboard Learn, Oracle Peoplesoft enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, and Microsoft applications such as SharePoint, Lync, and Exchange. The increasing demands of the applications and users were straining the college's legacy network, so administrators made the decision to upgrade.
The college selected the 64-bit AX 3000-11 Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) from A10 Networks because it was "a proven virtualization solution that fulfilled the requirements of high density and high performance, while delivering on flexibility and reliability," according to a news release from the company.
"We chose A10 Networks primarily for the flexibility of the architecture," said David Creamer, director of network systems and TV operations for the college, in a prepared statement. "The ability for us to create various virtual load balancers within the AX Series and still maintain performance was very important. Additionally ease of configuration and cost compared to our previous solution was appealing."
The AX Series high-performance application networking platform provides several key features:
- Multi-tenancy features to manage a large number of applications;
- Comprehensive Layer 4-7 feature set;
- Flexible virtualization technologies such as aVCS;
- Support for public, private, and hybrid cloud environments;
- 64-bit Advanced Core OS (ACOS); and
- Scalable shared-memory parallelism architecture.
St. Petersburg College operates five campuses throughout Pinellas County, FL and offers numerous four-year bachelor's degree programs. The college serves more than 63,000 students, including 32,000 online distance education students, and employs approximately 3,000 faculty and staff.
Further information about the AX Series Application Delivery Controllers can be found at a10networks.com.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].
