ACADEMIA

Foundry Networks Inc. announced that Florida A&M University (FAMU), one of the top-ranked academic institutions in the U.S., selected Foundry Networks for a campus-wide, high-speed wired and wireless network infrastructure upgrade. The FAMU campus network includes 131 buildings across more than 419 acres and is growing with a five story, 47,000 square foot library expansion. FAMU will use Foundry's scalable, chassis-based FastIron(R) 400, 800 and 15000 enterprise Layer 2/3 switches and modular FastIron Edge switches to upgrade its 400-node library network, to outfit a new library annex of 300 nodes, to improve network security and virus protection, and to provide edge switching to thousands of students and faculty campuswide. FAMU is upgrading its infrastructure to keep pace with the demands of advanced teaching and research applications, and to achieve state-of-the-art network performance, reliability and management capabilities. FAMU is a longtime user of wireless LAN technology and wanted to leverage new IronPoint wireless offerings from Foundry to complement its hundreds of installed wireless nodes. Foundry's complete wired and wireless architecture will help FAMU upgrade its existing library facility and to network a new library annex already under construction. The FAMU Library system is expanding to accommodate the growing collection of books, periodicals, and non-print materials that are categorized electronically and increasingly shared through high-speed network connections. To meet these networking requirements, the FAMU library will use Foundry's FastIron and FastIron Edge switches to deliver fiber connections to every desktop, and Foundry's new tri-mode 802.11 IronPoint(R) access points to enable wireless LAN connectivity for the new library facility. To improve edge Layer 3 switching capability campus wide and deliver power to the new access points, FAMU will rely on FastIron Edge switches with 802.3af standard Power-Over-Ethernet capability. Finally, FAMU has purchased Foundry FastIron chassis to provide added virus filtering capability at wire speed with scalable extensibility as more networked applications and users are added to the network. "We are committed to enhancing our computing and technology resources to the levels needed for high-quality support of administrative, instructional, and research efforts," said President Dr. Fred Gainous for FAMU. "This network upgrade represents a big step forward in achieving the kind of technology infrastructure we need to deliver high quality learning programs through our entire campus," said Wayne Dunwoody, Campus Sr. Network Engineer / Manager at FAMU. Following a competitive selection process, FAMU chose Foundry's technology based on price/performance, port density and features. In particular, FAMU valued Foundry's ASIC-based implementation of network-wide traffic monitoring through sFlow (IETF RFC 3176), which is embedded in Foundry's wired switch and router products, and a key advantage of the FastIron Edge switches powering Foundry's IronPoint wireless offering. "Foundry's implementation of sFlow provides real-time, 'always-on' wire-speed traffic monitoring with no impact to network performance," said Daniel Andrew, FAMU Network / Security Engineer. "We are committed to helping customers like Florida A&M realize a high rate of return on their network infrastructure investments, and we are delighted to support this upgrade including deployment of our new IronPoint wireless solution," said Ken Cheng, vice president of marketing for Foundry.