Massachusetts University Selects Lancope StealthWatch
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POSTED BY Jody Ma Kissling on 11.11.2011 0 comments |
Getting a better handle on network traffic became critical when Fitchburg State University went from having Wi-Fi in common areas and academic buildings to providing 100% wireless in all residence hall areas using a campus-wide 802.11n Enterasys network. With the upgrade, students started connecting more than just their laptop to the network. Suddenly smartphones, tablets and gaming systems were also adding to the traffic onslaught, Roger said. As a result, a network that once had 3,000 to 3,500 devices connected at any one time was now exceeding 7,000. Suddenly network capacity management was critical.
The networking team at the Massachusetts university selected Lancope StealthWatch as a NetFlow analyzer, and set its Enterasys Networks routers to publish NetFlow records to the appliance. The school also installed multiple StealthWatch FlowSensors around campus to gain visibility into infrastructure that does not natively support NetFlow.
The traffic visibility afforded by StealthWatch has streamlined the university’s approach to network capacity management and has helped the school avoid a costly and unnecessary infrastructure upgrade.
“The NetFlow analyzer’s daily dashboard reports opened up visibility into our network right up to the CIO level,” Roger said. “In the past, if we were reaching our bandwidth maximum, I would have to go begging and pleading to get additional money to increase bandwidth. Now with all this reporting going up to our CIO, he could see our bandwidth growth over the last several months and he came to me and said, ‘Hey, get a price on increasing bandwidth.’ It made my fight for funding a whole lot easier.”
Lancope's success in helping Fitchburg State University face the unique challenges of a massive, open, and widely distributed computing environment is just one more illustration of the power and flexibility of StealthWatch.
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