University adopts Juniper data centre solution

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 01 September 2011 00:41

New Zealand's largest university, the University of Auckland has deployed data centre network architecture from Juniper to radically simplify its data centre network to support the adoption of a cloud computing model.

Juniper Networks New Zealand country manager, Ian Quinn, said the University of Auckland has had to grapple with the inherent limitations of three-layer networking as it virtualizes its data centre.

'By adopting Juniper Networks' innovative 3-2-1 data centre network architecture and deploying a switching infrastructure running the Junos operating system, the University of Auckland is benefiting from better scalability and performance, reduced complexity, and greater operational efficiencies.'

The university's strategy & design manager of the information technology service department, James Harper, said that as the university increased server virtualization, its legacy, three-layer data center network was becoming a 'growing constraint.'

'Juniper Networks' 3-2-1 strategy made a lot of sense given the challenges we were facing. Using Juniper Networks EX Series switches with virtual chassis fabric technology, we were able to collapse multiple switching layers in our legacy data center down to a simplified two-layer infrastructure.

'As a result, the data center network has become much easier to manage, with fewer devices and fewer interactions. Thanks to these operational efficiencies, the performance issues we had been seeing with our virtualized server clusters are a thing of the past.'

Ian Quinn says the solution deployed at the University of Auckland data centre comprises Juniper Networks EX8216 modular Ethernet switches forming the network core, with the fixed-configuration EX4500 and EX4200 switches at the top-of-rack layer providing 10GbE and 1GbE access ports.