H3C AD-Campus for Smart Campus of Minzu University of China

Customer introduction

Minzu University of China (MUC), formerly the Nationalities Institute in Yan'an, was founded in September 1941 by the Communist Party of China. The Central Institute for Nationalities was inaugurated in June 1951 in Beijing. In November 1993, it was renamed Minzu University of China. The CPC and the Chinese government attach great importance to the development of the university and identified it as a key university in 1978. Later, it was recognized a university of the "Project 211", "Project 985" and A-Level "Double First Rate". The school covers an area of 380,000 square meters and plans a new campus of 810,000 square meters. The university enrolls students from 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities, as well as , Hong Kong and Macao regions. Currently, there are 15,841 full-time students in the university, including 11,270 undergraduates and 4,386 postgraduates under the master and doctral programs.

Service requirements

The rigid architecture and complex O&M are the major issues of MUC's campus network. Faculty and staff are increasingly using BYOD applications on campus. Wireless mobile office is set to become mainstream in the future. Users hope to plug and play without interruption of services. For IT O&M personnel, realizing policy following and maintaining the same experience in the live network are huge challenges.

[H3C solution]

Architecture

According to the user characteristics of MUC and the data analysis of network usage and traffic, a new generation of flat campus network architecture, namely, Application-Driven Campus Network solution (AD-Campus), is tailored utilizing H3C's leading SDN technology and high-performance products. The solution inherits the legacy four-tier architecture of the university, in which the high-end SDN switch S12500-X and six high-performance SDN aggregation switches S10508 served as the core layer and S5560X switches are used for building aggregation. M9000 series high-performance multi-service security gateways deployed at the egress serve as the security devices in the boundary area of the campus network egress. The topology in the architecture is as follows:

Implementation effect

Using the new SDN campus network, the smart campus network of MUC has the following features:

Person-centered Both teachers and students can obtain correct permissions in classrooms, offices and dormitories. The network can be configured automatically without human intervention. The entire campus network experience is consistent, and the workload of network configuration and maintenance is minimized.

Simple O&M Network creation and deployment, capacity expansion upgrade, and faulty device replacement can be implemented through the controller, simplifying network O&M and boosting the efficiency of the information center.

Visualized network services Interfaces can be customized through terminal management, location information, and TOP-N hotspot applications to better display the live network service status in real-time.

[Customer benefits]

H3C AD-Campus provides MUC with the SDN campus network featuring high reliability, wide bandwidth, and easy management and maintenance, which efficiently undertakes the university's teaching, research and management services. The wired access bandwidth of teachers and students is increased by 10 times, the wired and wireless services are unified, and the maintenance workload is reduced by more than 50%, laying a solid foundation for the smart campus construction. The flexibility and scalability of the network, and the automatic device online greatly shorten the online period of smart campus services. At the same time, the unified billing platform has realized the unified user management and billing policy for wired and wireless users. After the SDN upgrading and transformation of the entire campus network, the school takes a huge leap in terms of informatization and digital campus construction, paving the way for further innovation of campus applications.

The H3C SDN campus network solution has been deployed in multiple universities of "Project 985" and "Project 211", such as Shandong University, Hunan University, Xiamen University, Fudan University, and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. As a new IT solution leader, H3C has continuously invested in and conducted R&D in the field of SDN for many years, providing mature and innovative solutions for education customers, and reliable and safe carrier networks for the smart campus construction in colleges and universities.