WITH a need to create a modern, future-proof network infrastructure to support bandwidth-intensive research applications and data sharing across global universities and research agencies - such as the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency) and the UNESCO (the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) - King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), the national science agency and laboratory for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has turned to Brocade to deliver a state-of-the-art network infrastructure comprised of high-performance campus networking and load balancing solutions. Commenting about the reasons behind the upgrade, Hasan Alhowimel, Assistant of IT Directory and Network Engineer at KACST, said “factors such as an increasing number of employees and deployment of bandwidth-intensive applications — like Oracle ERP, wireless applications as well as external services [to share data with international agencies]—led to tremendous strain on the underlying infrastructure. We had plans to go wireless to increase user productivity, but were being held back by the limitations of a network that could not deliver the kind of performance we required. The need for a more stable, high-performance network was becoming increasingly obvious to us, and we knew that the success of a number of our future initiatives would depend on a strong and reliable foundation." The new Brocade campus network environment, deployed by Brocade's local partner Nesma Advanced Technology, spans 16 buildings including the KACST headquarters, which houses the institution's data center. Each building has a Brocade FCX Series switch at the edge connected to a Brocade FastIron SX Series switch with 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) uplinks to Brocade BigIron RX Series core switches in the data center. KACST also deployed Brocade VDX 6720 Switches to provide reliability and performance, while paving the way for the institution to deploy Brocade Ethernet fabric technology and private cloud services in the future. The benefits of the Brocade FastIron SX switches, with industry-leading Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology, were immediately realized. – SG
