University of Wyoming

“Our DNS and DHCP system has gone from academic probation to the Dean’s List in a matter of a semester.”

—Brad Thomas, Network Specialist, The University of Wyoming

The Customer

University of Wyoming serves more than 13,000 students and offers more than 180 programs of study at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels. Their main campus is located in Laramie, and maintains the UW/Casper College Center, nine outreach education centers across Wyoming, and cooperative extension service centers in each of the state’s 23 counties and on the Wind River Indian Reservation.

The Challenge

Nestled against the idyllic backdrop of southeastern Wyoming’s rugged mountains and high plains, the University of Wyoming is the only provider of baccalaureate and graduate education in the state. Students and faculty pride themselves on their small-school charm coupled with major-university studies. However, one “program” that was earning failing grades was the University’s antiquated and obsolescent Cisco Network Registrar system for domain name resolution (DNS) and IP address assignment functions (DHCP).

“We couldn’t get any support when our DNS would fail,” said Brad Thomas, network specialistat the University of Wyoming. “Our staff and students would often lose network access, but worse, outsiders did not have access to us. Dynamic DNS and DHCP as well as resolving DNS queries for all the campus were a total failure.”

Additionally, the old system ran on Sun and required a Solaris Sys Admin to do upgrades andpatching, a cumbersome and manually intensive process that took days.

The Solution

The head of the IT network group had seen the Infoblox solution at another university environment. Additionally, he had recently seen a demonstration at an industry conference and was excited about the prospect of a standardized, appliance-based solution. After an evaluation of appliance-based solutions, including Infoblox and other DNS/DHCP solutions, the University of Wyoming IT team selected Infoblox due to its integrated, secure and highly reliable solutions.

“Infoblox has a reputation for quality, ease of use and delivering on its promises,” said Matt Kelly, network manager of DNS and DHCP at the University of Wyoming. “Infoblox stood up to their reputation—it is an appliance that works the way you expect it to and it takes very little effort to maintain.”

The University selected six Infoblox-1050s running DNSone. Installation was easy and they were able to upgrade the software with the click of a button using the grid technology. What used to take one or two man days a month is down to minutes.

The Result

Thomas summarized the advantages of Infoblox: “Our DNS and DHCP system has gone from academic probation to the Dean’s List in a matter of a semester. We have not experienced one outage. The updates and patching that used to take two days worth of man power can be done in minutes. And, because of the delegated administration capabilities, departments can now manage their own domains taking additional burden off of the IT department.”