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In April 2006, the CWA merged with Isle College to become one of the largest further and higher education
colleges in the east of England. With four main campuses at Kings Lynn, Isle, Wisbech and Cambridge (Milton)
along with various local learning centers, CWA has more than 10,000 full and part time students, 1,300 staff
and an annual income of £36.5 million. CWA was awarded grade one ‘outstanding’ status in the last Ofsted
inspection report published in February 2008.

Toby George, CWA’s head of IT Services, says: “After the merger with Isle College [in April 2006], we looked at
the IT environment required to support the enlarged institution and it became obvious that considerable
investment was needed to improve reliability and put in place an optimized IP infrastructure that would help us
move forward while reducing costs.”
CWA faced various problems with its old network. First, a disparate mix of technology was used on the various
different sites, which it inherited when the two organizations came together.

This posed several problems from
interoperability to network management issues that decreased overall efficiency. Second, the existing core
network switches were unreliable and nearly end-of-life as they were between five and seven years old. Third,
inter-campus bandwidth and server interconnectivity was inadequate. Finally, network-monitoring capabilities
were limited in the old switches resulting in management difficulties.

Martyn Smith, CWA’s network coordinator, says: “Pre-merger, we were running separate systems which had to
be amalgamated together so that one network served the combined institution, which then put considerable
load on our main data centre. Upgrading was paramount and the business case practically wrote itself.”

CWA IT staff developed a matrix of features and requirements - involving around 100 different criteria - that
were needed from its new networking equipment to ensure the right technology was chosen. The team
thoroughly researched the market and considered various manufacturers. The college deployed two Brocade BigIron® RX-16 Layer 2/3 Ethernet switches at the core and two Brocade ServerIron® application delivery
switches have been supplied by Brocade partner, Vanix, in a deal worth around £138,000.

Brocade’s BigIron RX series switches were ultimately chosen because they met CWA’s stringent needs, offered the
best price/performance, with Vanix providing comprehensive support and maintenance.

Smith adds: “For example, the Brocade switches offered wire speed performance so throughput is better than
competitive products, they’re IPv6 ready and Brocade has a 16-slot chassis in the BigIron range which meant we
could reduce the cost-per-port and save money by buying two rather than three chassis to meet our needs.”
sFlow® monitoring technology was another important reason for the selection.

A hardware-based statistical sampling solution monitoring down to byte level with no degradation in switch performance, sFlow allows CWA to
see with clarity what is happening to network traffic and where it is going in real-time.

Smith adds: “sFlow allows us to pick up student related issues - such as individuals playing peer-to-peer games -
so that we can manage our network resources better.”
The Brocade BigIron RX-16 switches are located at CWA’s main data centre in King’s Lynn, dual linked for
resilience, along with the Brocade ServerIron application delivery switches which will be used in future to load
balance a Blackboard-based online virtual learning environment.
With the new Brocade network, CWA is integrating numerous services onto the new network infrastructure to
maximize the investment made and reduce costs. The Brocade BigIron RX switches now underpin a new Mitel
3300 VoIP solution which is being installed to save money on inter-campus calls, with the expectation that video
conferencing will be rolled out shortly as well. Similarly, now that the wired network has been upgraded, the
college is implementing an IP-based campus-wide security system and WLAN to support the use of laptops in
lectures and in student areas.

Equally, CWA has installed an iSCSI-based SAN to support its virtualized server environment which is IPbandwidth
intensive and required additional network performance. In addition, CWA has recently launched its
own Internet television station, called Spring Board TV, where programmes are produced in HD as part of media
courses, with the equipment available for possible commercial use at a later stage. Gigabit to the desktop was
required to support video editing and streaming, with the obvious ‘knock-on’ effect being the requirement for
faster switching in the core.

George concludes: “I have absolute trust in Brocade. We’ve had 100 per cent uptime from the Brocade BigIron
RX switches and they have met all our requirements at a cost-effective price.”