* George Washington University is using BlueCat appliances to cut overhead costs on its IP network
If you’re looking to cut the overhead costs on your IP network, consider appliances. That’s the approach that George Washington University is taking, and it is proving successful so far.
GWU is migrating from a home-grown IP address management application to appliances from BlueCat Networks. GWU purchased four BlueCat Adonis 1000 appliances for its network, which links 160 buildings in the Washington D.C. area and supports 30,000 students, faculty and staff.
GWU has an all-IP, all-Cisco network, which has multiple gigabits/second of bandwidth in the core and 100Mbps of bandwidth to workstations.
For DNS services, GWU was running BIND open source software on a Sun Solaris server. The university used a homegrown application written in Perl for its Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and IP address management functions.
Our system was “working, but it required a lot of overhead with security and patches. And the DNS services weren’t integrated with DHCP,” explains Bret Jones, director of technology engineering at GWU. “The management and documentation for our system were pretty iffy. It was getting unruly to manage and maintain.”
That’s why GWU ran a competitive procurement for appliances to handle DNS, DHCP and IP address management. GWU considered solutions from MetaInfo, Infoblox and BlueCat.
“We chose BlueCat because their appliances were the most flexible as far as customizing the interfaces,” Jones says. “They have an open source database, as opposed to a proprietary database, and it is easier to integrate with [Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.”
Jones says GWU is installing the BlueCat appliances now and will migrate to the new systems over the summer.
“With the appliances, I expect to have a centralized place where I do my IP address management, DNS and DHCP,” Jones says. “I expect to have much less administrative overhead, with security patches and those sorts of things. I’ll also have better documentation and a more streamlined process for handing out those DNS and DHCP addresses.”
Jones says the appliances will result in GWU hiring one less full-time employee in the IT department.
GWU spent approximately $200,000 on the BlueCat appliances.
Jones says the BlueCat appliances will automate the process of handing out IP addresses, validating users and giving them access to the network. “Now this is more of a manual process, even though we have Web-based forms,” Jones says.
Jones is a fan of network appliances, having replaced software applications for firewalls, intrusion detection and virus scanning with appliances in recent years.
“I’ve been deploying appliances over the last three to four years, and those have generally worked out better because they don’t take up all that administrative overhead,” Jones says. “These are utility type services, and these appliances free my folks up to do other things we need them to be doing.”
More info about BlueCat’s appliances can be found here.
