Ahead of the Curve:
Towson University’s Data Center Refresh Powers Educational Innovation
Executive Summary
Customer Name: Towson University
http://www.towson.edu
Industry: Public University
Location: Towson, Maryland, USA
Number of Users: 21,000+ students,
1588 full-time and part-time faculty
members, 1756 full-time and
part-time staff members
Student Faculty Ratio: 17:1
Important Facts: Towson University
is state’s largest producer of business
undergraduates
As colleges and universities aim to increase their efficiency by deploying
network-based applications, many have found that their existing infrastructure is
not up to the task. Without a powerful engine under the hood, bandwidth-hungry
applications such as student streaming videos, voice-over IP, closed-circuit television,
digital signage and course management systems can severely drain the performance
of a campus network, rendering the applications all but useless.
Accurately predicting the need to develop and deploy a range of new solutions,
over the past several years Towson University has refreshed and transformed its
data center and network. Now, with a robust, reliable network powering innovative
applications campus-wide, a virtualized server environment, and two data centers that
offer greatly enhanced redundancy and disaster protection, Towson is well-positioned
to meet the needs of its students, faculty and staff.
Growth Sparks Need for New Infrastructure
Located eight miles north of Baltimore, Towson University, (TU), is the second-largest
public university in Maryland. Towson offers more than 100 bachelors, masters, and
doctoral degree programs in the liberal arts and sciences and applied professional fields.
In recent years TU experienced sustained growth, with student registration and faculty
hiring expected to continue to expand significantly. To keep pace, the four years prior
to 2011 saw Towson constructing seven new buildings, with several more planned for
completion on the main campus and in satellite locations by 2016.
At the same time, the rapid evolution in educational technologies has magnified
Towson’s need for high-bandwidth availability; with students transitioning to tablets,
netbooks and other mobile devices to access applications underpinned by rich digital
media, the university’s IT department was concerned that its older data center and
decentralized server model could not provide the computing platform needed by the
classrooms of the future.
“We were definitely hitting up against performance issues with our network; we
were basically outgrowing our old environment,” confirms Mark Addy, Towson’s
Director of Enterprise Services. “It had to do with the sheer number of servers
we had across campus, both inside and outside of our data center. We didn’t know
everything that was coming down the pike, but we knew we’d have to prepare for
some really big changes.”
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Slow Network Undermines Virtualization
Planning for Change
By 2005, in addition to the servers housed in the data center, a
large number of additional servers were being maintained by the
various academic and administrative departments. “These lacked
climate control, firewalls, backups and physical security,” Addy
says. “We didn’t even know about many of them, making it almost
impossible to provide patches when something went wrong. But
our network was almost ‘forcing’ the servers to be located out in
the field; since we only had 1- or 2-gig connections, we were
experiencing continuous bottlenecks. So people told us they
needed their local servers.”
For a number of years, the networking configuration proved
more than adequate for the university’s needs. Then came
a sea change in content delivery: faculty members showed
an increasing preference for adding digital multimedia
elements to their courses. In addition to desktop and laptop
computers, students expected access to their curricula via
mobile devices. Towson’s reach was expanding as well, with
the construction of a new, 300,000 square-foot Liberal Arts
Building. Two new residence halls – which would house a
total of 1,200 students – also were being added to the main
campus, along with a new student commons building.
Addy and Towson’s IT team had virtualized a number of data
center servers, which helped reduce the number of physical
machines needed to power a range of applications hosted on the
campus. But with the network frequently lagging when running
high-bandwidth applications, such as video editing, the university
did not derive the full benefits of virtualization.
Thus, in 2008-2009 the university implemented a data center
refresh. The goal: to re-architect the network, and replace a
number of switches. “We shifted from a core base of Cisco®
Catalyst® switches to Cisco Nexus® products,” says Jim
Monroe, TU Director of Infrastructure Projects and Operations.
“With just that change alone, our network became more
stable and reliable.” At the same time that the data center
was being upgraded, an upgrade of the network infrastructure
in 42 buildings across the campus also was completed. This
complemented the 900 wireless access points that Towson had
deployed across the 328-acre campus beginning in 2004.
These additions dictated a fresh look at Towson’s
infrastructure”, says Chief Information Officer Jeff Schmidt.“It
wasn’t so much that things were ‘broken’; we just wanted
to make them better. Almost everything we do at Towson is
impacted by the need to have a robust, functional network.
Also, we knew we would be putting video and voice on the
network in the near future. Having the right infrastructure in
place would be the key enabler.”
Two Data Centers Required
While evaluating the refresh of Towson’s Cook Data Center,
Schmidt and university administrators determined that the
best strategy would be to add a second, smaller facility.
Approximately one-third the size of the Cook Data Center,
the Union Data Center is now used primarily to ensure
redundancy and the timely recovery of all critical systems in
the event of a catastrophic failure.
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The Cook and Union data centers are connected together via
multiple 10-gigabit high-speed links and house a combination of
Cisco Nexus 7018, 5020 and 2148 switches, with the application
and software environment supported by Cisco Unified Computing
System. On average Towson is seeing a ratio of approximately 27
virtual servers per half width blade; tests are proving successful
at 60+ virtual servers per half width blade. In total, the solution
has significantly enhanced Towson’s networking and computing
capabilities, while reducing the physical resources needed to
deliver applications and services.
“We put Cisco Fabric Extenders (FEXs) in place, which gave us
gigabit speeds across the board and completely changed the
way we install servers. We had one day where we pulled 1,000
pounds of copper off the ladder racks; that was awesome.
Also, the FEXs to our Nexus 5020s give us better overall
resiliency.”
Mark Addy, Director of Enterprise Services,Towson University
“If one of the switches dies or goes offline, the network is still
online,” Addy continues. “And should something catastrophic
happen in Cook, we could reconfigure our application servers and
be back online in a timely manner.”
Cisco UCS Maximizes Virtualization
A few months following the network upgrade Addy oversaw a
second, major virtualization initiative, aimed at further reducing
the number of servers in the data center, while increasing
the bandwidth to the servers. This time, with Cisco Unified
Computing System and high-speed links helping to optimize
I/O performance, the full potential of Towson’s virtualized server
environment was realized.
“Network speeds and memory were causing bottlenecks to our
VMware ESX servers,” Addy explains. “Cisco UCS addressed
both of these issues in a big way. As a result, we have doubled
the number of physical VMware host servers, and we have a lot
of capacity in our environment. We’re confident that this solution
will carry us a long way into the future.”
The addition of Cisco Unified Computing System offered a
significant advantage in the server provisioning process for
TU, Addy says. “We could virtualize servers we hadn’t even
considered virtualizing before, and we could do it faster and
with less concern about performance or contention issues.
Before UCS, bringing major applications online meant a large
amount of extremely time consuming, physical work in the
data center, such as cabling, installing patch-panels, etc.
Cisco UCS is a true all-in-one solution; now we cable once,
and we’re done with it.”
Aging Servers Have the “Blues”
When Director of Information Technology & Field Support
and Adjunct Professor Michael Bachman’s computer science
students toured the Cook Data Center after its completion,
they received a very visual lesson in the power of server
virtualization. Walking into the center, students saw a sea of
blue: all of the servers that were about to be decommissioned
were tagged with blue painter’s tape.
Says Bachman, “Students could really see how the server
consolidation and network virtualization was making a huge
difference. We explained how the process is affecting the
university’s use of electrical power, and how that translates into
their tuition.”
Servers Safe, Reliable Inside Firewall
As soon as the data centers went online, Schmidt’s
department was empowered to plan for growth and expand
the breadth of services offered across the campus. For
example, Towson’s athletic department formerly shot, edited,
and archived its sports videos in-house. But the network
upgrade and enhancement of the data center changed that
model, such that all athletic footage is now hosted at the Cook
facility (with backup at the Union). Towson’s video surveillance
system – which includes feeds from more than 700 cameras
positioned around the campus – also is maintained in the
data center, along with the parking lot licensing registration
recognition system, the cafeteria point-of-sale and student
identification systems, and many others.
“Thanks to Cisco USC, network I/O is no longer is a
bottleneck,” Schmidt reports. “With the increased speeds,
expanded memory, greater network pipes, and virtualization
component of UCS, servers aren’t dispersed across campus
anymore. Instead, they’re housed in one of the campus’s two
data centers. This allows folks in other departments to manage
the areas in which their expertise lies, as opposed to managing
their servers.”
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The ability to pull applications into the data center is also
beneficial from a security and IT management perspective, Addy
says. “Getting the servers into the data center and behind the
firewall makes them secure. It also gives us a lot of insight into
which applications are running on the servers, and what they
need to be able to do.”
“What used to take us weeks or months to install now
takes days or even hours. It’s so much easier now to add
applications.”
Jim Monroe, Director of Infrastructure Projects and Operations, Towson
University
Lower Cost, Higher Quality of Services
Schmidt estimates that nearly 95 percent of the applications
hosted on campus are now housed in the data center. Most
importantly, in a time of continuing economic pressure, the
enhanced support of applications and services actually has had a
positive impact on the university’s bottom line.
“We’ve been able to expand the range of services we offer
without significant increases in staffing, which we would never
have been able to do with the old model,” Schmidt says. “Plus,
moving to Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) has been
very positive for us; all of this consolidation on the network side
will definitely cut down on our maintenance costs, and we’ve
been able to reduce our incremental staffing. We’ve also seen
reductions in our power consumption and HVAC, while increasing
the quality and range of services we can provide.”
Robust Network Supports New Service Offerings
Towson University’s enhanced network supports a range of
new and enriched, bandwidth-intensive applications, including:
ȤVoice-over IP
ȤLecture capture
ȤVideo surveillance
ȤDigital signage
ȤLicense-plate
recognition/parking
ticketing
ȤPoint of sale
Ȥ“Smart” classrooms
ȤDesktop virtualization
ȤCourse management
system
Connecting Students Off-Campus and On
In his computer science classes and his role as IT director,
Bachman has seen the benefits of the new applications and
service offerings firsthand. For example, TU now has over
360 smart classrooms connected to the campus network.
At a minimum each offers a document camera; many have
computers and projectors as well. Additionally, three new
Cisco TelePresence® Systems connect students in Towson’s
Department of Nursing, located at the Hagerstown Center,
normally a 90-minute drive by car.
“With the TelePresence systems we can link these students
and give them a better feel for our campus. We’ve had
a multi-vendor, remote learning solution for years. Now
we’re taking that solution and building more toward a
Cisco environment. This will enable us to have more
standards-based communications via TelePresence and
our other videoconferencing solutions,” Bachman says.
The campus also has moved to voice-over IP (VoIP)
telecommunications, courtesy of Cisco UCS, and has
added Cisco Video to bring an even richer user experience
to telephone calls. In the classrooms, Bachman will be
test-driving Cisco Show and Share®, a webcasting and video
sharing application.
“What that will do,” he explains, “is give us a way to store
video assets of all types. The potential of this data center
solution with end-points in the classroom is huge, because
we think it can scale indefinitely. Also, using Cisco Show and
Share will allow us to replace our cable TV-based distribution
network with a network-based one. And, we can use Cisco
Media Experience Engine to convert the content to the many
different formats that students use on their mobile devices.”
Hassle-Free BYOD
Towson’s ability to deliver content to students via their devices
of choice – iPads, iPods, smartphones and more – is one of
the most important benefits of the university’s data center
refresh. No longer required to sit at a desktop computer, or
even tote a laptop to class, today’s students expect to be
able to access information 24/7, in the way that suits them
most. With a robust network in place, and a stable application
production platform in the data center, TU is now able to meet
this demand.
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Says Schmidt, “If you have students coming to campus and
they want to use the wireless network, now it’s always there
and it’s always available, so they can take advantage of the
mobile devices they bring. And in the classroom, if a faculty
member says ‘I want to use these technologies to teach, so I
need network availability,’ we don’t have to go through a bunch
of cycles; the infrastructure’s already in place. We can do the
architecting, and we can do the design and implementation so
it’s right the first time. There’s a lot less ‘fire-fighting’ involved.”
Towson’s IT Leadership Team: Jeff Schmidt, Jim Monroe, and Mark Addy
“I see…tablet devices becoming game-changers…and
what’s displayed on them will be coming out of our data
center. The great thing is that Cisco offers a package that
will meet many of these challenges at the same time.”
Addy agrees that the university’s data center refresh and
network upgrade have enabled faculty members to deliver a
higher-caliber, more engaging curriculum. “The fact that we
now have smart classrooms, that our course management
system is more reliable and resilient, and that we can provide
all of these other tools…this is building confidence in the
faculty that these tools are available to them, and that they’re
reliable,”Addy concludes. “Now we have the opportunity to be
a business partner to all of the constituents on campus, and
support them with the services they need. That’s the biggest
thing we strive to get to. It’s all about the network; it really is.”
Michael Bachman, Director of Information Technology & Adjunct
Professor, Computer Sciences Towson University
Americas Headquarters
Cisco Systems,
Inc. more storage,”
“People will always want more bandwidth,
and
San Jose, CA
Bachman observes. “We have to keep pace and add the
necessary wireless access points and increase our density.”
Asia Pacific Headquarters
Cisco Systems (USA) Pte. Ltd.
Singapore
Europe Headquarters
Cisco Systems International BV
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Cisco has more than 200 offices worldwide. Addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are listed on the Cisco Website at www.cisco.com/go/offices.
Cisco and the Cisco Logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks
mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1005R)
All About the Network
Schmidt believes that TU’s Cisco infrastructure removes the
barriers to learning, while supporting a truly 21st century
educational paradigm. When students have anytime, anywhere
access to content, education is not confined to the four walls
of the classroom, nor must it only be delivered according
to a class schedule. Additionally, a backbone simplified and
strengthened by data center virtualization frees a university’s IT
department from the day-to-day maintenance of endless racks
of machines. Instead, IT professionals can focus on developing
the out-of-the-box applications that support critical thinking,
along with active and collaborative learning.
Americas Headquarters
Cisco Systems, Inc.
San Jose, CA
Asia Pacific Headquarters
Cisco Systems (USA) Pte. Ltd.
Singapore
Europe Headquarters
Cisco Systems International BV
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Cisco has more than 200 offices worldwide. Addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are listed on the Cisco Website at www.cisco.com/go/offices.
Cisco and the Cisco Logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks
mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1005R)
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