CASE STUDY
Having opened a new campus in Cyprus, the university faced a choice: replicate the IT setup of their UK campuses in Cyprus, or move to a centralised private cloud hosted in their UK datacentres, giving all campuses shared access.
With limited time available, Advania was brought in to assess, plan, and deploy a new infrastructure before students would need to access the system.
Founded in 1828, the University of Lancashire (formerly the University of Central Lancashire, or UCLAN) is a world-class educational institution. Today, the University is home to 42,000 students and delivers hundreds of courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. The university has several campuses across the UK, and opened the first British university in Cyprus in 2012.
To support the campus in Cyprus, the university needed to deploy technology that could ensure a consistent student experience – no matter which campus they were attending. Students across sites needed to be able to access the same environment, without their learning being obstructed by poor connectivity.
Industry:
Education
Organisation size:
40,000+ students
Solutions:
Cloud solutions, data centre & networking
The University faced a choice: replicate the IT setup of their UK campuses in Cyprus, or move to a centralised private cloud hosted in their UK datacentres, giving all campuses shared access.
While the former seemed simpler, the cost of replicating systems in Cyprus would be high, and the university couldn’t be certain that local expertise on-site at the campus would be able to support the deployment and maintenance of the system.
However, delivering services from UK datacentres to Cyprus presented unique challenges of its own. Connection speeds on the island were uncertain, creating doubts over the feasibility of delivering all planned services through the cloud whilst maintaining the performance students required.
Time for the project was short, with a two-month window available to assess, plan, and deploy a new infrastructure before students would need to access the system.
The university decided to proceed with a private cloud, but they needed to hedge their bets and maximise bandwidth utilisation to achieve the best possible performance in Cyprus. This led them to evaluate SDWAN acceleration technologies, specifically HPE Aruba.
Advania was brought to the table by HPE as an expert partner, able to help University of Lancashire through to a successful project.
Given the time constraints, Advania suggested establishing a proof-of-concept on the university’s network in the UK as soon as possible.
Loan equipment was shipped almost immediately, and with minimal technical support, a link was established between the university’s Preston and Wales campuses.
Advania deployed a comprehensive SDWAN acceleration solution to help connect the university’s private cloud, including:
The SDWAN acceleration solution delivered exceptional results:
The solution proved its resilience, operating faultlessly even when the entire Cyprus campus was powered by a single generator. During fortnightly maintenance – which temporarily brought all IT systems offline – the HPE Aruba appliance consistently restarted without issue.
Student satisfaction has been excellent, with no complaints about connectivity or performance, demonstrating successful harmonisation of the IT experience between UK and Cyprus campuses.
Frank Wadmore
Network Manager, University of Lancashire
The success of the Cyprus project has driven the university to explore further offshore campuses. The university’s IT team is now looking at converting the appliances to virtual solutions which offer even greater throughput and are even more economical to run.
The solution and relationship fostered with Advania will be an important ingredient in enabling future IT services to be delivered to students at additional international sites, providing a proven blueprint for offshore campus connectivity.
Contact us to discover how we can put the Advania Advantage to work for your requirements.
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