Advertisment

With an eye on SDN, SJTU upgrades networking backbone

The university has deployed a new 10 Gbps network backbone spanning five campuses to accommodate growing data traffic

author-image
Sonal Desai
New Update

BENGALURU, INDIA: One of China's oldest universities, Shanghai Jiao Tong Univeristy (SJTU), has upgraded its networking backbone.

Advertisment

It has deployed a new 10 Gbps network backbone spanning its five campuses to accommodate growing data traffic from academic and administrative systems.

Brocade deployed its MLXe core routers that are built with a state-of-the-art sixth-generation network processor-based architecture and terabit-scale switch fabrics that enable the university to run the backbone at 10 Gbps with the capability to support 40 and 100 Gbps wire-speed interfaces. The routers also provide high-performance Layer 2/3, IPv4, IPv6, multi protocol label switching (MPLS), wire-speed encryption, and SDN features.

MPLS is being used by SJTU to segment the backbone into virtual networks that accommodate different application streams, including campus CCTV and the YiKaTong smart card access system that previously ran on physically separate networks.

Advertisment

The new networks that run on Brocade routers have enabled the university to boosts core performance tenfold and halve network management costs. It also helped the university to streamline management by migrating applications that previously ran over separate networks onto a single infrastructure. Besides, the architecture will enable SJTU to pursue its interests in software-defined networking (SDN), both at an academic level and as a way to support digital campus service innovation.

Founded by imperial edict in 1896, SJTU also referred to as the Eastern MIT, has grown substantially and today, has a student population of almost 40,000 and 1,900 professors and associate professors.

"We operate a large and complex network that has to reliably deliver services to tens of thousands of wired and wireless devices across our campuses," said Rui Xie, Director, Network Information, SJTU. "We have been using Brocade MLX series routers in our backbone for the last nine years and the Brocade MLXe routers we recently deployed have enabled us to cut network management costs by 50 percent while increasing core network performance 10 times. They provide us with a solid pathway, based on open standards, into the world of SDN."

Eric Yu, Vice President, Greater China Brocade, said, "The university has a great deal of interest in SDN, both from an administrative and academic perspective, and we are expecting to see a lot of SDN-enabled innovation come out of there in the next few years."

sdn brocade