2007 Campus Technology Innovators: Virtualized Networks

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > 2007 Campus Technology Innovators: Virtualized Networks

Features

2007 Campus Technology Innovators: Virtualized Networks

8/1/2007

IT staff served as the first test group to migrate their computers in the spring of 2006. During the summer, this team wired residence halls, and students helped identify bottlenecks in the migration process. For the August move-in weekends, IT set up temporary help desks in each residence hall to assist with network connections. During this time, Rice designed and built a new data center, which was scheduled to open in July 2007.

RICE UNIVERSITY
Director of Networking,
Telecommunications,
and Data Center Operations
William Deigaard:
"Considering the scope of
this project, it's amazing to
see what we've accomplished
in the past 18 months."

Myriad benefits. Thus far, the system has worked wonders. Faculty, staff, and students have the same network privileges regardless of their campus location—wired or wireless. Researchers can send petabyte files from Rice highperformance computers to project collaborators all over the world. Graduate business students can access project data with laptops from any location on campus. Perhaps most impressively, cello students can participate in Yo Yo Ma's Florida master class via high-speed Internet2 videoconferencing.

But there have been other benefits, too. First, Khan says gigabit connectivity will allow researchers to solve very large data-intensive problems and submit more competitive grant proposals. He notes the sophisticated network also will give Rice an edge with faculty recruitment and retention. The network will even reduce departmental costs through consolidation to central servers and services. Finally, the university will see a greatly reduced risk of data loss with enterprise storage and the new data center.

Challenges met. Alas, no project is perfect, and the Rice network migration presented a few surprises along the way. Khan says the academic schedule created challenges for wiring and desktop migrations in faculty offices, and he notes that school technologists learned the hard way that re-cabling an active research institution environment cannot be done during daylight hours. All that is behind the team now; down the road, says Khan, the next phase will incorporate applications, ePortfolios, web services, and open source for data collection and system integration.