Shanghai Jiao Tong University upgrades network backbone with Brocade routers

Source: SJTU website.

One of China's oldest and most prestigious universities, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), has deployed a new Brocade-based network backbone spanning its five campuses to accommodate the growth of data traffic from academic and administrative systems. 

SJTU offers education in business, law, medicine, life science, and social sciences. It has a student population of almost 40,000 and a faculty of more than 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 of Network Information at SJTU. "We've been using Brocade MLX Series routers in our backbone for the last nine years and they've proved to be very robust, so when it came time to select a new generation of infrastructure we looked at Brocade first. 

"The Brocade MLXe routers we recently deployed have enabled us to cut network management costs by 50% while increasing core network performance 10 times. They provide us with a solid pathway, based on open standards, into the world of SDN."

Brocade network engineers worked with SJTU to devise a custom solution based around Brocade MLXe Core Routers. The routers enable the university to run the backbone at 10 Gbps with support for 40 and 100 Gbps wire-speed interfaces as needed. 

The new network has enabled the university to reduce costs and streamline management by migrating applications that previously ran over separate networks onto a single infrastructure. Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) is now 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. 

The Brocade solution also paves the way for 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. The Brocade devices support OpenFlow Hybrid Port Mode, which provides a pragmatic path to SDN by allowing SDN to control specific data flows while the remaining traffic is routed as before.

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