Networking & Wireless

U Sao Paulo Upgrades Massive Wireless Network

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/09/10

One of the largest public universities in Brazil has built up its wireless infrastructure using routing gear from Brocade. The network at the University of São Paulo in Brazil hosts 41,000 computers and thousands of other devices in use by 80,000 students and 6,000 faculty members on seven campuses.

U Sao Paulo traditionally used a combination of Cisco and 3COM equipment. When the latest purchase was put out for bid, the university said in a statement, it selected Brocade technology owing to a combination of performance and overall cost-efficiency advantages.

"After evaluating various vendors, Brocade was able to provide us the best overall price-for-performance, high reliability, and one of the lowest total costs of ownership," said Tereza Cristina Carvalho, director of CCE-USP, the campus computing center.

The university has deployed 25 NetIron MLX routers, which provide 10 gigabit Ethernet data transport and 1 gigabit port density. The company says these routers are best suited for metropolitan area networks, Internet edge/aggregation routing, virtualized data centers, large enterprise core, and high-performance computing environments.