The Philadelphia-based University of the Sciences has adopted a next-generation Avaya network to meet the growing needs of its 4,000 students, faculty members and administrators.
The university’s aging information technology infrastructure was impacting performance due to bottlenecks as a result of rising demand.
In addition to capacity and speed, the university was seeking a solution that would enable it to support a variety of applications critical to its mission including telephony, classroom management software, online and distance learning. It also needed a way to manage the bandwidth demands because of the proliferation of tablet PCs, laptops and the other mobile devices brought to campus by students.
Noting that the individuals who rely on the university’s network feel it is as vital as electricity or any other core utility, Mark Nestor, associate provost and CIO at the University of Sciences, said that it simply don’t have patience with outages.
Nestor said that Avaya’s high-availability products provides it with an “always-on” platform that meets the expectations of students, faculty and administrators alike. He added, “We have peace of mind that the reliability is there, which frees us to focus our time and attention on strategic initiatives that help our university remain competitive."
The new Avaya infrastructure comes with a distributed design that eliminates any single point-of-failure.
A pair of Avaya Virtual Services Platform 9000 Series Core Switches anchors the network. If there is a fire or some other calamity, the physically separated switches ensure uninterrupted service. Further, these products are found at the network edge and come with special load balancing and failover capabilities, increasing both capacity and availability.
Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, , data solutions and related services to companies of all sizes around the world.
In related news, the company also unveiled its video teller machine for the Chinese market, which will combine robust technologies and the VTM design concept from GRGbanking, a manufacturer of automatic teller machines, with Avaya video conferencing and contact center technologies and expertise.