Education Institutes Embrace Non-Blocking Network
If you think educational institutes have no need of a high performance, non-blocking network, think again.

Educational institutes, similar to many of the commercial organizations today, are no longer simply brick-and-mortar in nature. As these organizations develop, not only do they expand their program offerings but also extend to reach students who have various needs and are from different parts of the world.

Embracing new development model
To meet the development needs, educational institutes have ventured out of their campuses to offer interactive programs conducted online. At the same time, competition for students intensifies. In a bid to sustain growth and development, an educational institute must differentiate itself.

While courses are no longer just held in physical classrooms and course materials become multimedia oriented, the employees are also increasingly reliant on multimedia to communicate and collaborate with each other. As a result, education institutes feel the pressing need to ride on networking technologies for the provision of better programmes, services, and support.In addition, as e-learning has become widely popular, education institutes' network infrastructure must be of high speed, high performance and high availability.

However, many of the networks in place today were originally deployed to support applications such as email, which involved minimal multimedia and interactive contents. These networks, when used to support a growing number of students and multimedia applications, pose a real challenge to educational institutes.

This is particularly true when video-conferencing is deployed. The users, be they students, academic staff, or other employees, would expect high quality interaction and images. No delay, packet drop are acceptable in such a real-time, interactive setting. And this is where a non-blocking network comes into play. A non-blocking infrastructure, ensuring minimal delay, high speed, high performance, and high availability, empowers an educational institute to support their new development models that require the provision of multimedia course content and real-time collaboration.

Choosing the right non-blocking network solution
Networking solutions available today in the market are rather similar, often lauded by their suppliers as non-blocking enabled. It becomes increasingly important that educational institutes pick the right solution from the numerous offerings, because networks, once in place, are used for long term. If a wrong solution is picked, an education institute will risk injecting more resources into making it right in the future.

Industry-standard solution
Education institutes must shun proprietary solutions, no matter how appealing they might look. The reason is simple; they cannot provide you with any investment protection and compatibility. On the contrary, industry-standard solution is your key to investment protection and compatibility. Industry-standard solutions would prevent vendor lock-in, allowing you a broad spectrum of product choices in the future.

Solid domain knowledge
Besides, make sure you pick a vendor who possesses solid and sound domain knowledge. Leading edge technology is a must, but is never the single most important reason why you choose the solution. Choose a vendor that understands your development model and the requirements peculiar to education institutes. A vendor who has rich experience in deploying networks for education institutes would be able to minimize the implementation pain and ensure a smooth process.

Huawei-3Com has gained working knowledge of the education sector through helping a range of education institute build their networks. In China, Huawei-3Com has provided networking solutions to more than 200 universities, and has already brought its valuable learning and insights to benefit similar organizations in other parts of Asia. You are rest assured of the right technology and the right solution when your vendor has such rich domain experience and knowledge.

State-of-art technology
One important question that you need to ask is whether a vendor stays at the forefront of technology. A vendor who does not only provides you with state-of-art technologies, but also the knowledge in coming up with the right solution for you.

Is the vendor you consider knowledgeable about and offer, for instance, 10G Ethernet? 10G Ethernet is not just about speed, but a paradigm in networking today and the near future. 10G Ethernet helps build a quality, intelligent, and self-adapting platform, which empowers education institutes to keep up with the heated competition and fast changing user requirements. A vendor which offers end-to-end industry-standard 10G Ethernet solutions would make the building of a non-blocking network an easier job. Go for the vendor which offers 10G Ethernet solution from the access to the core layer.

For instance, Huawei-3Com offers a 10G network model comprising a high-quality IP core, a flexible intelligent access and management and control mechanism. Such a network model is of paramount importance because all these components interact and orchestrate an end-to-end intelligent and integrated platform on which your applications run.

Embrace a solution that features high availability, high speed and high switching capacity, superior security, and easy management. The key components of your network platform must come with redundancy, or mechanisms that improves reliability and avoids single point of failure. In addition, always make sure you can easily upgrade performance, equipment, and services on the same existing platform. This not only saves you cost in the long run but also saves your upgrade effort.

On the security front, go find out what security measures a solution supports. Does it support the most robust ones such as 802.1X authentication and centralized MAC address authentication? Does it perform authentication before users access the network?

A non-blocking network must also be easy to manage. Does the network solution come with features and tools that enables simplified network management? Does your network allow you to lower maintenance cost? All these questions must be asked because they help you to make the right decision.

Huawei-3Com, a provider of a myriad of advanced networking solutions, injects 10% of its revenue back into R&D annually, a strategy to ensure customers will enjoy better features, more advanced solutions. Its 10G Ethernet solution, designed to work for a range of organisations of large and medium size and education institutes, is built-in with redundancy measures and strong security.

Of high switching speed, the Huawei-3Com 10G Ethernet offerings is also highly scalable, allowing education institutes to upgrade at their own pace. The company's easy to use and easily managed equipment helps education institutes reduce the total cost of ownership.