Oral Roberts banishes Cisco

University replaces aged Catalyst network with Enterasys after competitive bid

By Jim Duffy on Wed, 05/05/10 - 5:36pm.

Oral Roberts University has excommunicated Cisco from its network in favor of Enterasys, the Siemens Enterprise division announced this week. The school named for the evangelical minister selected Enterasys during a competitive bidding process that included HP and Brocade.

Fifty Cisco switches, ranging from the Catalyst 6500, 5500(!), 3500 and 2900 will be replaced by 12 Enterasys N-Series switches in the core and 50 C-Series switches at the edge. The network connects more than 3,000 students and 700 staff across the main Oral Roberts campus in Tulsa, OK., and is designed to support the school's VoIP and streaming video initiatives.

The Catalyst 5500 emerged in the mid-1990s and was EOLed a year ago. Support for it will wrap up in 2014.

Oral Roberts CIO Tannie Olsen said the Enterasys switches provided more integrated security, role- and policy-based access management, automated move/add/change and support features that would have been "cost-prohibitive add-ons" with the other vendors' proposals.

"We were told by other vendors that this type of granular control wasn't possible at the price point we required," Olsen is quoted as saying in an Enterasys press release.

Enterasys said the core network was replaced in a single weekend.

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