National University of Ireland, Galway

“Our previous in-house developed systems were complex to maintain and develop and,therefore, relatively expensive to administer. Working with KHIPU Networks, moving to Infoblox appliances has provided visibility, resiliency and control while reducing error related risk andtime-consuming manual tasks.”

—Ron Owens, Principal Technical Specialist National University of Ireland, Galway

The Customer

With more than 16,000 students and more than 2,200 staff, NUI Galway has a distinguishedreputation for teaching and research excellence in the fields of arts, social science, and Celtic studies; business, public policy and law; engineering and informatics; medicine, nursingand health sciences. NUI Galway is a research-led University with internationally recognizedexpertise in selected priority areas.

Today the University is leading the field in a wide range of areas including stem cell and genetherapy research, human rights law, environmental change, and developing the next generation of internet technology. The University is home to two Science Foundation Ireland-fundedCenters for Science, Engineering and Technology and the Regenerative Medicine Institute (REMEDI) as well as DERI, the world’s largest research institute of Internet technology.

The Challenge

The University of Ireland, Galway was experiencing growing pains. After years of expansion withnew students, research and remote offices, the University’s conventional solutions to manage DHCP and DNS were becoming cumbersome and unreliable. Over recent years, there hasbeen significant investment in NUIG’s core network infrastructure that has resulted in higherlevels of service at lower cost. As the network service matured, NUIG focused effort on othernetwork based infrastructure services such as DHCP and DNS. Like the network service, theseservices were prime for investment in order to reduce costs, while at the same time increasinginfrastructure levels and reliability.

Ron Owens, Principal Technical Specialist, at the University of Ireland, Galway commented: “Wehave many small departments originally provisioned on UNIX servers and BIND. The solutionworked, but it was not very elegant and it was complex to manage and maintain. There wasno system in place to alert our department if there was a problem. For example, if there was aproblem over the weekend, on Monday morning we would come to work and have 600 unitswith no IP addresses.”

At the University, each server had to be managed independently and there were frequentupdates/patching. These processes made poor use of the already limited IT staff resources. Onthe security front, the legacy systems were open to attack further adding to the IT burden.

The Solution

In 2007, the University set out to find a new solution. The staff knew they did not want to build ahomegrown solution as that would be too taxing on university resources. The IT staff had specificrequirements for their new network infrastructure services vendor, including high availability,continuous uptime, reduced administrative overhead and costs and increased visibility. After evaluating several vendors, the university chose Khipu Networks for the delivery andimplementation of the Infoblox solution.

The first phase of the implementation took place in March, 2007 with the deployment of 2 Infoblox-1050 appliances. The Infoblox-1050-A network services appliance platform is designed to servesmall- and medium-sized enterprises and branch-office applications, and can be deployed as astandalone unit or in high-availability pairs.

Phase two began in November 2008 with a major extension of Infoblox systems. The IT staffinstalled two more Infoblox-1050’s for primary and secondary internal DNS, both configured as Infoblox Grid™ masters, two Infoblox-550’s for external authoritative DNS, as well as an additional twoInfoblox-550’s to be used as cashing forwarders. Finally, in April 2009, the university installed anadditional-1050.

The university worked closely with Infoblox’s UK reseller Khipu Networks Limited for a successfulinstallation, maintenance and continued servicing of the appliances.

The Result

The university now has reliable, manageable and secure network infrastructure services with DRadvantages for their education environment. Infoblox appliances have allowed for:

• Continuous uptime;
• The ability for staff to focus on other critical projects;
• Reduced administrative overhead and costs; and,
• Increased security.

“The National University of Ireland is one of the top research institutions in Europe. We host morethan 80 websites and domains,” continued Owens. “The reliability and security of our networkinfrastructure services solution is essential for the day-to-day operations at the University. Ourprevious in-house developed systems were complex to maintain and develop and, therefore,relatively expensive to administer. Working with KHIPU Networks, moving to Infoblox applianceshas provided visibility, resiliency and control while reducing error related risk and time-consumingmanual tasks.”