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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News -
Networking:
Florida A&M Chooses Foundry To
Upgrade Network Performance
Foundry Networks Inc, a performance and total solutions leader for
end-to-end
switching and routing, announced that Florida A&M University (FAMU), one of
the top-ranked academic institutions in the United States, has 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
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 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 FAMU president Fred Gainous.
"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 senior 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.
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