How to easily cope with the challenge of providing Internet access to dormitories for 20,000 teachers and students? What tricks did Qilu Normal University have?

How to meet the Internet access needs of nearly 20,000 teachers and students in their dormitories?

How to operate and manage the network of 80 low-voltage rooms in 13 dormitory buildings?

The demand for network bandwidth has increased exponentially. How can we expand and transform it?

How to deploy network equipment and bridge wiring once and have no worries for ten years?

Let's go into the student dormitory of Qilu Normal University and see how they solved it.

Qilu Normal University is a public full-time general undergraduate normal college. The predecessor of the school was the School of Education of East China University, which was founded in 1948. It was restructured and renamed Qilu Normal University in 2010. In 2018, the school successfully passed the undergraduate teaching qualification evaluation of the Ministry of Education. In 2021, it was approved as the first batch of supporting universities for the construction of applied undergraduate universities in Shandong Province. It is also the second batch of pilot universities for artificial intelligence to promote the construction of the teaching team of the Ministry of Education.

Difficulty in network upgrade and operation and maintenance

Dormitory network transformation is imminent

In the context of new educational infrastructure and digital campus construction, the digital construction of schools is also in full swing. The construction of a digital campus involves all aspects of the school, not only in terms of education and teaching, but also in the lives of teachers and students. Due to the rapid upgrading and transformation of the campus network, the network needs of teachers and students in school are constantly increasing. The original network of the dormitory can no longer support the current network needs of teachers and students. However, network upgrades are relatively complicated and troublesome. At the same time, there are many difficulties in operation and maintenance management:

1. 13 buildings, more than 80 weak-current rooms, operation and maintenance is time-consuming and labor-intensive

The Zhangqiu Campus of Qilu Normal University has 13 dormitory buildings and more than 80 weak-current rooms. With the original traditional network solution, all 13 dormitory buildings need to deploy aggregation switches, using core, aggregation, and PoE access methods. Operation and maintenance personnel need to regularly inspect and record the network equipment in each weak-current room. When a dormitory network fails, the operation and maintenance personnel need to go to the site to handle it. When some problems cannot be accurately located, one problem needs to be handled in many weak-current rooms. The fault handling speed is slow, which takes up a lot of time for the operation and maintenance personnel, seriously affecting the network needs of teachers and students.

2. The demand for Internet access among teachers and students is huge, and bandwidth is difficult to meet. Adding switches is only a temporary solution, not a fundamental solution.

In the early days of the school network construction, we did not take into account the rapid development of network technology. The rapid increase in network equipment in the teacher and student dormitory network has led to a huge increase in network demand. Network freezes and disconnections have become common problems in daily network life, which greatly affects the learning and daily life of teachers and students. During this period, the school also used measures such as increasing bandwidth, adding switch equipment, and optimizing the network environment, but they were only temporary solutions. The three-layer network architecture of the traditional network limited the increase in bandwidth from the bottom.

3. There are many devices in the weak current room and they are placed in a disorderly manner. The wiring plan is complicated and difficult to transform.

The dormitory building has densely populated rooms and numerous weak-current rooms. Network equipment from operators, network centers and other parties are chaotically placed in the weak-current rooms. At the same time, the weak-current rooms also accommodate building intelligent equipment and fire network equipment from logistics, security, fire and other departments, making network transformation difficult.

The wiring scheme of traditional networks is cumbersome and complicated, and the capacity of the wire bridge reserved in the initial construction is insufficient. Network upgrades may require changes to the wall structure, which consumes huge manpower and material resources.

The power supply situation of network equipment in the dormitory is complicated. If local power supply is used, strong power design needs to be carried out in advance, and the safety and management of electricity use in the dormitory rooms need to be considered.

Etheric Light Blessing

Dormitory network transformation is fast and operation and maintenance efficiency is high

Facing the challenges brought by traditional dormitory networks, Qilu Normal University, based on the current mainstream technology route for digital campus optical network construction, selected a flexible and efficient minimalist Ethernet color optical network solution after in-depth investigation and comprehensive comparison. The Ethernet technology route ensures efficient data transmission, while optical fiber as a transmission medium ensures the stability and high speed of transmission. All-optical links are used to interconnect the core to access layer equipment, passive wavelength division equipment is used in the weak current room, and the access layer equipment is moved from the weak current room to the indoor room for deployment.

Ruijie's Simplified Ethernet All-Optical Network Architecture

1. Transparent convergence of Layer 2 interconnection greatly simplifies network operation and maintenance

At the aggregation layer, passive transparent aggregation replaces the original active aggregation switch in the building. While reducing the intermediate fault nodes, it realizes the second-layer interconnection from the core room to the optical access switches on each floor. The operation and maintenance personnel only need to perform operation and maintenance management on the core side and the access layer. At the same time, equipped with the SDN operation and maintenance management platform, offline warnings for all network devices, automatic alarm blocking of network loops, regular inspections of dormitory networks, zero-configuration replacement of access devices and many other measures have greatly reduced the daily operation and maintenance pressure of the school's operation and maintenance personnel and ensured the stable operation of the network.

Qilu Normal University dormitory core switch

2. Color light technology, exclusive bandwidth, no pressure on subsequent bandwidth upgrades

The Ethernet color light solution uses color light technology to transmit multiple optical signals of different wavelengths through a single optical fiber, and is equipped with transparent aggregation and indoor switches to achieve exclusive bandwidth for indoor use. At the same time, optical fiber replaces traditional network cables as a transmission medium, which is not limited by bandwidth and can achieve 100G to buildings and 10G to indoor use without considering communication capacity issues. Subsequent network bandwidth upgrades do not require link changes, replacement of weak current room equipment, or reconfiguration, truly achieving one-time deployment and ten-year peace of mind, providing great flexibility for network upgrades.

Ruijie Color Wavelength Division Multiplexing Technology

3. Save optical cable resources, reduce line deployment, and reduce the difficulty of network transformation

Thanks to the color light technology, passive convergence replaces the original active convergence, and the network architecture is reduced from three layers to two layers. Transparent convergence is connected to the core through optical fiber, reducing line deployment, and using the original network bridge to meet the needs, reducing the difficulty of network transformation and construction, without the need to demolish walls for transformation, and subsequent network upgrades have become very simple. Secondly, the transparent convergence device is a passive design and does not require circuit transformation.

Qilu Normal University dormitory transparent aggregation switch

After the dormitory network was successfully upgraded, the network ran smoothly, which not only improved the network experience of teachers and students, but also reduced the operation and maintenance pressure of network managers. Under limited human resources, the Ethernet color light solution effectively improved the operation and maintenance efficiency of the network center, fully demonstrated its efficiency and reliability, and won praise from the school.