For a university that can count 16 Nobel prize winners among its current and former staff and alumni, and with around 45 past or present presidents and prime ministers having studied or taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), it's small wonder the school is consistently ranked among the top universities nationally and globally.
The world-famous school undertakes research and teaching that spans the full breadth of the social sciences; from economics, politics and law to sociology, anthropology, accounting and finance. In competing against many of the leading institutions to attract the highest calibre students and researchers, the school has a series of vision statements, central to which is a commitment to the quality of all its services, including IT.
The school looked for an agile future proof infrastructure solution which could ensure secure connectivity and data transmission between its central London campus and data center in Slough, Berkshire, (a town 24 miles from the capital), provide support for network automation, management and orchestration using emerging SDN and NFV-based solutions and have the capacity to securely manage growing data volumes at high speed.
Additionally another important factor was to reduce the risk of data loss and maintain consistent support for its current application architecture during the transition; while also managing LSE's access to the UK's Janet academic network, a network shared with other higher education establishments, serving 18 million users.
To meet the above business challenges, data center interconnects were created through the deployment of Juniper Networks technology and via support from Juniper's Elite partner, Axians, who collaborated with LSE to produce an innovative future-proof network infrastructure.
Axians helped LSE create a tailor-made interconnect solution with multiple, resilient 10Gbps connections between its data centers. Four Juniper Networks MX240 3D Universal Edge Routers were used to provide a resilient mesh of VPNs from each London router to each Slough router. The MX240 delivers the high performance, reliability and scale needed, with up to 1.92Tbps of system capacity available. In addition, a Juniper Networks SRX5400 Services Gateway cluster was provided to secure the network edges and Juniper Networks QFX5100 Ethernet Switches were deployed behind the SRX5400 gateways to provide the data center fabric, using Juniper's Virtual Chassis Fabric technology. Once a design was established, Axians provided a Proof of Concept (PoC) in its dedicated lab facility and put the solution through a stress testing process so that throughputs could be verified in advance.
In addition, the MX240 routers provide encryption using IPSec. "Encrypting all of our traffic is essential because the Janet network is essentially a public cloud and we have no assurance that applications transmit confidential data securely," remarked Matt Bernstein, Senior Network Architect at LSE. "Encryption gives us long-term confidence that our solution will meet our future security needs and compliance demands."
The result was a robust network that supports LSE's estate of over 200 applications which range from timetable scheduling to student services and financial systems, all with secure and resilient links into its data centers. Bernstein continued: "We have 10Gbps wherever we need it, end-to-end. We can support more applications and the whole system is far more robust."
As the blurring of networks and systems becomes more important, LSE is also now considering how the solution might benefit from SDN. "We can't know what our academies will need from the IT infrastructure in a few years' time so we built in a future-proof network from day one," Bernstein added. "The solution anticipates future capacity, topologies and technologies like SDN, because we know we can do more or less anything we need to on the Juniper equipment."
Today, the school is now able to benefit from a scalable network design that was a perfect fit for its business challenges, and moreover, one that will support the institution both now and well into the future.
