Extensive Network Upgrades for Universidad Privada de Tacna, Peru

The University of Tacna is one of the top universities in Peru with over 5,000 students. It consists of the main campus and several branch offices. As the university continued to grow and the number of students increased, as did the amount of data passing through the network, the university turned to D-Link to offer a suitable 10 Gigabit Solution.

For more details, read the full case study here.

Challenges

Delivering a robust and scalable network infrastructure that can effortlessly connect the main campus to the branch offices. The main goal of the project was to provide centralized access while upgrading data speeds from single Gigabit to those of 10 Gigabit.

Solutions

D-Link delivered a complete end-to-end network, comprising both PoE & non-PoE switches, as well as the transceivers necessary to expand the network over wider distances, improving bandwidth and generating high redundancy. At the heart of the network’s new infrastructure was the DGS-6604, DGS-6600-CM, and DGS-6600-48T Chassis Switches. Highly powerful, they can easily take care of the core switching.

Meanwhile, the DGS-3420 Series was deployed at the distribution layer and the DGS-3120 Series at the edge layer.

For this solution, the DGS-6604 was configured for L2 and L3 switching. For the L2 configuration, it was necessary to create more than 30 VLANs to separate network traffic based on who the users were and which branch office they were located in. VLAN Link Aggregation Protocol (LACP) was configured to bring improved bandwidth, avoid bottlenecks, and provide superior redundancy.

At Layer 3, static routing and VLAN routing were configured to provide better communication between branch offices.

The DGS-3420 Series was deployed at the distribution layer, providing 10Gbps connectivity to the core layer thanks to its SFP+ ports. Finally, the DGS-3120 Series deployed at the edge layer providing connectivity to end-users. These switches were configured with VLANs to provide reliable connectivity, and Loopback Detection prevents network-crippling loops from occurring, mitigating downtime across the network.

Results

This solution allowed the university to vastly improve network performance with faster and more efficient data transfer and make bottlenecks a thing of the past.