Responding To Changing Needs of Students & Staff

Overview & Challenges Faced

Leeds Beckett University has more than 27,000 students and 2,800 staff located on two campuses. Its Information, Media and Technology Services (IMTS) provides a wide range of IT, software application and audio visual services for both staff and students at the University.

In 2010, Steve Whitaker, senior infrastructure consultant within the Technology Services section of IMTS was part of the team tasked with considering the implications of the imminent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and planning the subsequent transition to IPv6. At the time, mobile computing was on the increase, as was the need to provide Internet access to a growing number of temporary visi- tors to the University’s recreational spaces such as its coffee shops. Identifying an effective IP Address Management (IPAM) system that would provide a single point of access, and could streamline tasks while maintaining resiliency was a key requirement of the project. In parallel IMTS was integrating ISC’s DNS and DHCP on a server running Sun Solaris with all its IPv4 services driven by in-house scripts. The team had to find a solution that would not only encompass its current IPv4 requirements, but that would also provide a migration path to IPv6.

With a clear set of requirements and a fixed project budget defined, Steve set about contacting all the leading vendors. “We whittled a short-list down to those vendors that could support both our current and future requirements and EfficientIP was the only one able to do that,” Whitaker explained.

They were able to take the ISC BIND, fully integrate it and manage it with their IPAM.

Key Benefits

Solutions & Outcome

EfficientIP’s SOLIDserver was selected because it met both IMTS’s technical requirements, including being able to run on open source as the University was moving to Linux, as well as the Universities limited fixed budget.

It took the team from EfficientIP three weeks to implement. and integrate SOLIDserver with the University’s existing service. “The whole project ran smoothly and EfficientIP provided a very high level of post-purchase support,” said Whitaker. “The implementation team took full ownership of any issues, were quick to respond and communicated via live web sessions or on the phone. We found this personal approach worked really well.”

In addition to meeting the functional requirements, EfficientIP has allowed IMTS to delegate IPAM to various user departments. The University’s School of Computing and Creative Technologies, for example, needs full control of its DNS and DHCP to support specific teaching requirements. The school was provided access to its own DHCP cluster, allowing IMTS to retain overall control. SOLIDserver has also proved to be an extremely reliable solution for the University delivering very quick upgrades and ease of install (operating system is supplied with the appliance). In addition, tasks such as configuring a LAN that would have taken 30-40 minutes with the previous system can now be completed by the end-user in less than five minutes.

One significant benefit of the new IPAM system is its business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) capabilities as the appliance itself holds the central configuration. With appliances located in two locations, in the event of an outage at one of the sites, the other appliance is able to take over. This gives the University high availability and significantly reduced recovery times of minutes rather than the previous days or weeks.

“With Universities becoming ever more competitive and students and staff becoming reliant on network and Internet access, the flexible and effective solution that EfficientIP provides for IPAM and BC/DR gives Leeds Beckett a real advantage,” concluded Whitaker. “As far as I am aware, no other vendor can do this.”