Optimizing FNU's ICT Infrastructure

FNU's Operations facility supports seven faculties, management, and administrative staff. The IT infrastructure includes high-end switches, Ethernet switches, layer-2 switches, Windows servers, Multiservice Platform routers, and a server farm with public services. The logical topology of the Operations facility is similar to the campus backbone. Various applications and enterprise services run on FNU campuses, including email, web services, HPC, online and distance education, data analytics, GoogleDocs, Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud, Academic Information Management System, Video Conferencing System, Laboratory Software, and more. The problem statement highlights that FNU's current ICT infrastructure is complex and costly to maintain, compromising the university's growth and sustainability. To address this, a smooth transition to interoperability, leveraging latest advancements in network and information security, is needed.

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Network Redesign for FNU
Overview
Business Domain:
The network redesigning is required at The First National University (FNU). FNU is a higher
educational organization for long distance learning. This is the first educational organization
providing online courses in the country. The university runs online training and courses; it requires a
network infrastructure of very high performance to provide Quality of Services to the end users. The
university covers 5 regional campuses and 10 metropolitan campuses and a main campus to run
such a huge educational institute. University offers undergraduates programs and postgraduate
programs through distance learning. Moreover it provides Vocational and Educational Training (VET)
as well as short programs for professionals to increase their skills. FNU teaches 45,000 students at
both undergraduate and postgraduate level for various programs on-campus whereas 15,000
students are studying off-campus for distance education at FNU. To ensure services to be delivered
at all the ends, FNU’s network is designed to divide into 3 facility centers. Firstly, Headquarters,
where main campus is located. Second, Operation i.e. Data Centre which is located 50 km away from
headquarters. At the Operations center, the technical staff is appointed for managing and
performing IT related tasks required for proper functioning of the network. The third division is the
Backup Facility. Backup facility is located 1000 km away from the main campus. This is because
backup facility is needed only when operation facility breaks down.
Apart from the main campus, all regional and metropolitan campuses are very similar in terms of
size, staff, and technologies. Their IT infrastructure uses relatively old and complex technologies.
FNU still uses a number of protocols to enable campus communication to the main server farm
located at the Operations.
Each campus is connected to the university backbone through old Multiservice Platform Routers for
flexible LAN and WAN configurations, easy upgrades, and the handling of various protocols at the
internet and transport layers. The router enables the campus to communicate with different FNU
campuses located in different sites.
To support the day-to-day learning and teaching activities, academics and administrative staff at
FNU also deals with a dozen (12) of external partners including hospitals, research centers, vendor
support, and technology partners in many different ways, non-necessarily compatible each other.
Network Issues:
1. As discussed above, due to heavy number of users on the network, it may result in network slow
down. The online submission is the key facility provided by FNU for ease of submission and
evaluation for the students as well as staff members. Due to online submission for both on-campus
and off-campus students, it has been observed quite a few times that the network problems
appear which makes the late submission for most of the students which in turn results in the bad

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grades.
2. FNU has no Bring your own device (BYOD) and Work at home (WAT) policies embodied in the
network which is highly needed by the students and staff to make it possible to work from their
own devices. For this purpose, the secure wireless network should be implemented which
supports BYOD and WAT.
Immediate actions to take in regards of the identified issues:
1. Scalability for 50% increased enrollment in next three years.
2. Improvements with issues in online assignment submissions.
3. Implementation of bring your own device policy by adhering wireless network in the campus.
This enables the students to work on their own laptops, tablets, notebooks and smartphones.
4. With WAT it will allow users (students and staff members) to access network facilities from
their homes.
5. Security measures must be taken to safeguard data from the hackers.
6. Providing Quality of Services to the network users both at on-campus and off-campus.
Identify Organisation’s Needs and Constraints
In response to the senior management call, the IT department at FNU developed a list of
technical goals that should be implemented as soon as possible:
1. Redesign the current network including provision for wireless services.
2. Overhaul the IP addressing scheme.
3. Increase the bandwidth of the Internet connection to support new applications and the
expanded use of current applications.
4. Provide a secure, private wireless network for students, staff and visitors to access the
campus network and the Internet.
5. Provide a network that offers a response time of less than a second for interactive
applications.
6. Provide a network that is available approximately 99.9 percent of the time and offers an
MTBF (mean-time-between-failure) of 6000 hours and an MTTR (mean-time-to- repair) of
less than 90 minutes.
7. Provide security to protect the Internet connection and internal network from intruders.
8. Provide a network that can scale to support future expanded usage of multimedia
applications including online teaching.
9. Automate the majority of the network tasks and services including plug and play,
network configuration, network management, troubleshooting, network
monitoring, resource sharing, load balancing, updates, and data backups.
Existing Network

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Current ICT infrastructure Summary
ICT infrastructure at Metro and Regional campuses
Hardware
 Staff equipped with Desktop PCs running Windows 7 (dual monitors)
 Staff PCs equipped with first generation headsets and webcams
 4 networked Laser Printers in each faculty
 10 computer labs, each equipped with 24 PCs running Windows and a printer
 One Network Attachment Storage for local storage
 100Base-TX Switched Ethernet
ICT infrastructure at Headquarters (main campus)
Hardware
 Staff equipped with Desktop PCs running Windows 10 (dual monitors)
 Staff PCs equipped with latest generation headsets and webcams
 20 networked Laser Printers (also capable of scanning and photocopying)
 50 computer labs, each equipped with 24 Desktop PCs running Windows 10 and a printer
 One Network Attachment Storage (NAS) for local storage
 Staff equipped with VoIP video phones
 100Base-TX Switched Ethernet
ICT infrastructure at Operations site
 Operating systems: Combination of Windows and Linux servers
 Staff equipped with Desktop PCs running Windows 8
All operational servers including file, web, mail, DHCP, DNS, Authentication, Blackboard, Domain
Controllers, Database, SAN, Load Balancing and video streaming servers are concentrated in this
facility. The Operations facility also contains the infrastructure to support FNU’s learning
management and student information systems; and ERP services.
ICT infrastructure at Backup site
As mentioned, the Backup is a warm-site facility that can take over within minutes in the event that
the Operations facility fails. The backup site infrastructure mirrors the Operations facility.
Wide Area Networks (WANs) at FNU
Currently, FNU supports its wide area network operations using a mesh topology of three (3)
Layer2 VPLS (Virtual Private LAN Service) point-to-point circuits. This mesh guarantees
redundancy between the Headquarters, Operations (Data Centre), and Backup sites.
Each regional and metropolitan campus is also redundantly connected to the major facilities (links to
Headquarters, Operations and Backup respectively) via Frame Relay permanent virtual circuits (PVC).

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Similarly, two separate frame relay Internet Service Providers (ISP) are used for redundant Internet
access: one PVC via the main Campus (Headquarters) and the other PVC via the Backup site. The
external partners are connected to FNU via DSL.
At FNU the current network has consistency, performance, and reliability problems owing to a
growth in enrolments and recent operations expansion. The IT department has been informed about
an increase in student and faculty complaints. Particularly, faculties and academic staff claim that
owing to network problems, they cannot efficiently submit grades, maintain contact with colleagues
at other campuses, keep up with research, and conduct their daily tasks. Similarly, students say they
have submitted student work late due to network problems. Assignments submission has been
problematic since the introduction of the online submission approach. Students complain that late
submissions have impacted their grades badly. Despite the complaints about the network, faculty,
academic staff, and students use of the network has almost tripled in the last three few years
Campus Network in FNU (Main, Metro, and Regional Campuses)
Each FNU campus is supported by 100Base-TX Switched Ethernet LANs, and FNU is expecting to
upgrade to more modern Switched Ethernets. Staff at FNU are distributed as follows:
1. 250 employees including academic (x150), administrative (x50) and management staff (x50).
There are about 2,000 on-campus students in each of the regional and metro campuses.
2. The main campus houses around 2,000 employees including academic (x1000);
administrative (x500) and management staff (x500). Nearly 15,000 on-campus students
are studying at the main campus.
The Operations facility is also supported by 100Base-TX Switched Ethernet LANs. In the Operations
facility, there are 100 engineers in charge of technical support of the data centre, networking,
maintenance, and application development. The organisational and operational structure of the
Backup facility is similar to the structure of the Operations facility.
Academic staff at the main campus, regional, and metro campuses teach courses in seven faculties,
namely: arts and humanities, business, social sciences, mathematics, computer science, the physical
sciences, and health sciences. The administrative staff handle admissions, student records, and other
student operational functions. The management staff consists of human resources, senior
management and information technology. Enrolment at FNU has almost tripled in the past three
years; and the faculty and admin staff has doubled in size.
Each campus backbone (including main, regional and metro campuses) supports the operations of
the seven faculties, management, and administrative staff. The following are the details of the IT
infrastructure:
1. A high-end switch in each building is connected to a high-end Campus core switch in the
campus backbone.
2. Within each building, 24-port Ethernet switches on each floor connect end user systems.

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3. Floor switches are connected to the high-end building switch.
4. The 100Base-TX switches are layer-2 switches running the IEEE 802.1D Spanning Tree
Protocol.
5. All devices are part of the same broadcast domain. All devices (except public servers) are
part of the 192.168.0.0 internal network
6. Addressing for end-user hosts is accomplished with DHCP. A Windows server in the
cluster located in the Operations facility acts as the DHCP server.
7. A Windows-based network management software package monitors the switches
using SNMP and RMON. The software runs on a server in the cluster located in the
Operations Centre.
8. FNU email and web servers use public addresses assigned by AARNET (Discuss with
your mentor the allocation of these public addresses). The system also provides a DNS
server that the FNU uses. All these public servers are located in the Operations facility.
9. The Multiservice Platform router in each campus has a default route to the WAN and does
not run a routing protocol.
10. Campus servers support for local file storage (students and staff) and data backups that
are periodically transferred to the main data centre at the Operations Facility
The logical topology of the Operations facility is similar to the Campus backbone. The main
difference is that the server farm with the public services (Web, email and file services) are housed in
the Data Centre of this facility. The Multiservice Platform router at the Operations facility acts as a NAT-
Firewall.
Application and Enterprise Services
The following table provides a summary of the main network applications and enterprise
services currently running in all FNU campuses.
Application / Service Description Users
Students and academics’ work On-campus students use the
network to write assignments
and other documents.
Computer Science academics
and students use the network
to develop code. They can save
their work to file servers in the
campus servers and print their
tasks on printers within the
campus and other buildings.
Students and academic staff
Electronic Mail (SMTP) Email is used campus-wide (MS
Outlook Desktop).
Students and University staff
Web services (HTTP and
HTTPS)
Use of web browsers to access
information, participate in chat
rooms, and other typical
Web services.
Students and University staff
University Library The University has a main Students and University staff

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library at the main campus
and smaller library facilities at
each regional and metro
campuses. Students and staff
access the online library
catalogue.
HPC Higher Performance Computing
Cluster located in the
Operations building. This
system is part of the nation’s
scientific research program.
Students and faculty in
collaboration with
external partners
Online and Distance Education All faculties have online
teaching programs that require
video streaming via Blackboard
Collaborate.
Students and Academic staff
Moodle Learning Management
System
Management of learning
resources
Students and Academic staff
ERP Human Resource Management
and SAP Enterprise Resource
Planning
Administrative and
Management staff
Student Information System The University administration
staff uses this system to keep
track of class registrations,
enrolments and student
records.
Administrative and academic
staff
Data Analytics Business intelligence Platform
to find, explore, and share
data-driven insights within
FNU.
University Senior
Management
GoogleDocs Online word processor to
create and format documents
and work collaboratively.
University staff
Office 365 To access Microsoft Office apps
on Windows, macOS, iOS,
Android, and Windows mobile.
It also provides webmail and
social networking services via
the Exchange Server
Students and University staff

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Adobe Creative Cloud To access Adobe apps including
Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
and Premiere Pro.
Students and University staff
Academic Information
Management System
Academic workflow support Academic staff
Video Conferencing System For Online meetings. Each
campus has at least two virtual
rooms fully configured.
Students and University staff
Laboratory Software All computer labs are equipped
with Microsoft Office and a
wide range of software
development tools (both
proprietary and open source)
Students and University staff
Problem Statement
FNU business processes rely on a combination of systems and services with a very complex ICT
infrastructure. FNU academic board acknowledges this as major issue that could compromise
FNU’s growth and sustainability. The senior executive argues that currently the University is
spending a huge amount of money to maintain and integrate disparate and cumbersome systems,
with little room to expand and improve services. FNU needs to change and re-provision the ICT
infrastructure to provide high quality learning and teaching in the most cost-effective way.
As part of this change, the transition to interoperability should be achieved in a smooth manner while
leveraging the latest advancements in network and information security infrastructure to guarantee
“zero” problems. This might also include the migration of key university applications and services to
the Cloud.
In terms of network and information security, the ICT infrastructure should safeguard appropriate
access and use of resources; and ensure unauthorized and malicious internal and external network
attacks are properly blocked. Network redundancy is currently achieved with the mesh topologies
(VPLS and Frame Relay); however, nothing has been done in terms of security plans for both disaster
recovery (DRP) and business continuity (BCP).