Planning to build out the largest 802.11n wireless deployment required the network team at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis-St. Paul to also have in place a management platform that could cover potentially 9,500 access points spread across 300 buildings while also keeping an eye on the wired net.

Currently at 1,600 Trapeze Networks' access points, the university began the initiative to create the largest 802.11n deployment to address and support students' mobility and network connectivity needs. Yet with 85,000 ports on the predominantly Cisco network, the educational institution also needed to ensure the additional wireless wouldn't wreak havoc on the wired net or cause staff more labor than necessary to simultaneously maintain the two environments. Fortunately, the network team says, Entuity won an RFP process about five years ago and the vendor's Eye of the Storm management platform continues to serve the mixed environment well.

“Although the primary objective of the wireless upgrade project was to provide fast, flexible and secure wireless access to our user community, it needed to be done in a way that was complementary to our existing infrastructure and would not introduce new maintenance headaches," says Louis Hammond, Director of Design and Operations Networking and Telecommunications Services, University of Minnesota Office of Information Technology. "Managing the new wireless environment in our existing network management solution, Eye of the Storm, allows us to leverage existing processes and expertise giving us economies of acquisition, deployment, operation, and ongoing maintenance.”

One of the Big Ten schools, U of M has the fourth largest student body in the United States, serving more than 80,000 people across the 1,204 acres of the U of M Twin Cities campus (in Minneapolis and Saint Paul). The challenge with a network of this size is getting a product scalable enough and with adequate processing power to go out and query tens of thousands of devices and ports at a speed the keeps data relevant, says Mike Faust, network design engineer at the university.

"You really need a management platform that is lightweight enough to do those things without impacting network performance but that is also capable of not only polling that number of devices but also storing and analyzing all that data," Faust says.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.