Peer-to-Peer

How to network a campus for Rs 16.5 lakh

Shivani Shinde on how South Gujarat University’s campus network helped create an open environment for both students and faculty.

When Veer Narmad South Gujarat University was looking to network its campus, the main concerns were cost-effectiveness, scalability, stability of products, and the timeframe of the rollout.

Cost was an essential criterion for the institution. Unlike organisations in the west, which get massive funds from the government or corporates, Indian academia has to make do with limited budgets. That’s where innovative IT solutions spring from, and that is the route which South Gujarat University opted for.

The university has been around since 1966. It went in for campus-wide networking to provide students with the latest technology and allow them to share information.

The university was looking to connect its 26 buildings housing 18 departments. It has 2,000 regular students and almost 150 affiliated colleges. The most important criterion was the ability to complete the project within three weeks, for once the university reopened after the holidays, executing the project would have been difficult.

Selection and roll-out

After considering solutions from different vendors, the university with a budget of Rs 16.5 lakh opted for fibre connectivity from D-Link. According to Dr Apurva Desai, Professor & Head of the Computer Science Department at the university, “The selection process was the same as that in any government body—inviting tenders. Apart from the fact that D-Link quoted the lowest, we were sure of the quality of their products and delivery time as we were already using some of their other products.”

The tenders for the project were called in late June 2004, awarded to D-Link by August 15, and the project completed by September 4. The work included digging, laying and installing active components.

All of the university’s buildings in the campus, including the hostel building and the sports complex, are connected to the central computer centre through a 100 Mbps fibre backbone. The fibre and other components used are all single mode components. It was intentionally done this way because in future they can be upgraded to 10G. The fibre covers an area of 8 kilometres across the campus.

The central switch is a Layer 3 DES-3326S switch with two Chassis-based converters (DMC-1000). The remote 26 switches are Layer 2 manageable switches (DES-3226S). The entire campus is managed using SNMP D-View 5.1 software.

The departments are hooked up with Cat6 structured cabling. To avoid congestion on the network, the university opted for Cat6. The 100 Mbps bandwidth of Cat6 gives it sufficient headroom and bandwidth.

The new MCA and MSC-IT buildings are connected wirelessly through 54 Mbps wireless access points (DWL-2700AP, DWL-2100AP and wireless LAN cards). This facility is provided so that the staff can carry their notebooks to the labs and classrooms. Students can also connect to the network through Wi-Fi. All the access points have been configured for MAC filtering and other security features to prevent denial of service attacks.

The passive components include 8,500 metres of single mode steel tape armoured fibre with LIU, patchcords, etc. The DES– 3226S is a stackable 10/100 Mbps Layer 2 switch designed specially for departmental connectivity. It provides 24 10/100 Mbps ports, one GBIC port for server or fibre backbone connection, and scalable expansion through switch stacking of up to 13 units in a ring topology. It also has features such as port trunking, VLANs and priority queues, thus allowing a department to deploy a switching network for integration with a larger enterprise or campus network. One open slot is available for two optional fast Ethernet fibre or two Gigabit ports in stand-alone configuration. The switch provides an 8.8 Gbps switching fabric and supports auto MDI-II/MDI-X uplink for all twisted-pair ports.

Consolidated connectivity

Since we got the connectivity, students and professors can access the 12,000-15,000 journals that have been digitised Dr Apurva Desai Professor & Head Computer Science Department Veer Narmad South Gujarat University

The university wanted to create an open environment for sharing thoughts and ideas among the faculty and students.

The idea was to connect all the 300 computers on the campus and share the Net infrastructure. In terms of addressing scalability, the university was looking for an infrastructure to allow the use of technologies such as VoIP.

Unlike in IT companies where security is an important issue, sharing of information was crucial here. The aim was to promote knowledge-sharing so that research activities got the desired exposure. “Since we got this connectivity, students and professors can access the 12,000 to 15,000 journals that have been digitised,” adds Dr Desai. Further, since the university now has an R&D lab, the work in the lab is accessible to everyone.

The winning edge

For D-Link, the project was full of challenges right from start. At first, they faced competition from industry biggies such as Cisco, Dax and 3Com, while later they had to finish the project within the stipulated timeframe on a tight budget.

Domestic manufacturing proved to be D-Link’s strength here. Alpesh Raval, D-Link’s Branch Head for Gujarat and MP explains, “Although we manufacture products here, the raw material is imported and thus quality is not compromised.” The optic fibres used are from Corning Inc, a British company; the fibres are covered by double phase armouring, fibre jacketing, and then with PVC jacketing.

D-Link has its own labourers with the required training to work at short notice; this enables the company to complete work on time. Raval explains that a DMC-1000 Chassis is used to house the DMC-515SC 10/100Base-TX to 100Base-FX SC single-mode smart media converters. These convert 10/100 Mbps 10Base-T/100Base-TX Fast Ethernet twisted-pair signals to 100Base-FX Ethernet single-mode fibre signals. The structured cabling also uses D-Link products such as single mode steel tape armoured fibre with LIU, patchcords, etc.

With the connectivity done and systems running on these networks, the university now feels that it is on par with other universities.

shivani@expresscomputeronline.com