Feng Chia University adopts Brocade SDN platform

Feng Chia University in Taiwan has successfully deployed a Brocade networking solution to deliver smart network access within its on-campus student accommodations. Software-defined networking (SDN) is part of the university’s strategic direction for enabling new network services, and the decision to deploy the Brocade solution reflects the strength of the company's capabilities in SDN.

Feng Chia is Taiwan’s leading private comprehensive university*, with a strong foundation in business and engineering. The university has a total of 21,000 students, approximately 5,000 of whom live on campus.

“The university model of teaching and learning has changed a lot as a result of Internet technologies, and it is now critical that students have top-quality network access from their dorm rooms in order to leverage online educational resources,” said Bing-Jean Lee, President of Feng Chia University. “Our project is not only designed to provide a more robust and scalable network for our student accommodations, but also to have much more fine-grained management control over network service delivery through SDN. We are already trialling the new Brocade network’s SDN capabilities to manage access control and traffic accounting.”

The solution deployed at the university includes a SDN-capable core, aggregation, and access devices from Brocade along with an open-standards SDN controller and applications from local software partner YESEE. Carrier-grade Brocade MLXe 4 Core Routers provide a robust and highly scalable foundation with Brocade ICX®7450 switches in the aggregation layer, providing wire-speed 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) uplinks to the network core and 10 GbE downlinks to Brocade ICX 7250 access switches that deliver 1 GbE connectivity and Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) within the accommodation units.

“SDN is a revolutionary concept but its adoption, of necessity, must be evolutionary,” said Jeff Tsai, Country Manager for Taiwan, Brocade. “Feng Chia University’s end-to-end SDN-capable network enables it to test and migrate services to the new technology platform at its own pace. The Brocade solution delivers the SDN OpenFlow protocol in true hybrid port mode, allowing the university’s network administrators to progressively integrate OpenFlow, giving them programmatic control over specific network flows while the remaining traffic is forwarded as usual.”

Feng Chia University is already reaping significant network management benefits from the new infrastructure, even before a single network service has been migrated to SDN. Brocade Campus Fabric technology supported by the Brocade ICX switches enables the aggregation and access layers to be collapsed into a single logical switch. This approach enables shared network services while reducing management touch points and network hops through a single-layer design that spans the university’s campus accommodation units.

*Loosely defined, a comprehensive university is one which has relatively few research or doctorate programmes and which aims to prepare students for working life outside of academia. The term distinguishes an educational institution from a research university, which is focused on research and preparing students for academic life up to doctorate level, and from liberal arts colleges, which generally have more non-graduate programmes.