FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 30, 2005

MUW makes network upgrade

By Jill D. O’Bryant

COLUMBUS, Miss. -- In an effort to increase its technology capabilities and lay the foundation to integrate additional applications in the future, Mississippi University for Women has completed a network upgrade that runs on a state-of-the-art infrastructure.

“Faculty, students and administrative staff will have a solid foundation to integrate new technologies and education tools,” said Marco Obaid, MUW network administrator. “The new network is potentially 1,000 times faster than the previous design. The basic requirements for the new network are that it is highly resilient, secure and provides MUW with granular management capabilities to effectively shape and control traffic.

“In simple words, the new network has opened the future for MUW in terms of technology.”

In 1994, MUW began a technology initiative to wire the entire campus, including all the residence halls, using fiber optics. When the project was completed in 1996, MUW was the first completely wired university in the state of Mississippi.

According to Obaid, MUW’s backbone consists of over nine miles of fiber optics, approximately 75 miles of CAT-5 cabling and the most advanced switches and routers to ensure quality and reliable connectivity to every office and residence hall room on campus. Thousands of network ports were installed to provide ease of access to network resources from any location on campus.

He said, “The network infrastructure quickly became the nerve system of campus operations as users became entirely dependent on the Internet and campus network services.”

Obaid said the need for an upgrade became apparent in recent years due to network usage growing, especially among students, and the network bandwidth becoming scarce in some campus segments. In addition, new technologies emerged that were incompatible with the old infrastructure.

The new MUW network consists of more than 100 Nortel switches and supporting devices. It is the same equipment that is being used by the New York Stock Exchange, hospitals, universities, government agencies and many fortune 500 companies, Obaid said.

In addition, a state-of-the-art firewall has been installed to increase the campus network security, and a dedicated connection has been installed for the residence halls to provide students with increased bandwidth.

The implementation phase for the network upgrade began in mid-February and is about 95 percent complete. A team of Nortel and BellSouth engineers have been working with the Office of Network Operations staff on the project.

“The Computing Services professionals worked for months on the design for the network replacement,” said Nora Miller, vice president for finance and administration. “They researched a number of alternative approaches and worked with the contractors and providers to make sure that they had worked out the best solution for our future campus networking needs.

“Taking on the actual replacement was a huge job, and it required many additional hours of work and very little sleep for an extended period of time. I am really proud of the work that they did and very grateful for their commitment to getting the job done.”