Avaya provides networking education to Leeds Metropolitan University

Avaya today announced a deal with Leeds Metropolitan University, which has seen the firm build out a network for the 28,000 staff and students across the organisation’s campuses.

Avaya installed its Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA) Enterprise Fabric to connect up data the university’s distributed datacentres and increase the reliability of services.

Leeds Metropolitan claimed to have a 200% performance improvement, avoiding users of the network being let down by either planned or unscheduled issues at the back end.

The key technology enabling this is known as Shortest Path Bridging. Developed by Avaya, it creates multiple paths over Ethernet cables for data to travel down. It only occurs at the edge of the network, stopping any issues getting in the way of other traffic and reducing the margins of human error.

This also makes the Avaya network very scalable, as deploying new technologies and applications in the future is an easier process with less risk of interference from existing installations.

As well as across campuses, the virtual network allows secure but reliable connections from students studying at home and needing to use university resources.

The idea was to work with the existing hardware and software deployments and make changes piece by piece to make huge improvements to the network with little disruption.

Leeds Metropolitan was an existing Avaya customer, but a spokesman claimed the university did the legwork to see whether this was the best solution or not.

“After conducting a comprehensive review, we determined that by using the Avaya VENA Enterprise Fabric capability to empower our network, we can develop new solutions to the challenges and demands of delivering cutting-edge learning services,” said Phil Taylor, communications consultant at the university.

The overall goal is to be able to offer new and innovative educational technology to students, both at home and abroad, and the network is a key component.  

“We now find ourselves in the pleasantly refreshing position of being able to consistently say ‘yes we can’,” said Taylor.  

Last week, Avaya boasted it was becoming the choice for university and college networks, as it exhibited its latest solutions at the annual ACUTA conference for technology in higher education in Indianapolis.

It revealed it was partnering with more than 5,000 educational institutions to build new networks and improve existing ones.