Qinghai University: Ruijie's "Beauty of Minimalism" Blooms Magnificently on the Smart Campus on the Plateau

At present, the informatization construction of colleges and universities has undergone a transformation from digitalization to intelligence. On the basis of "form evolution and behavior evolution", it has entered the stage of "value evolution". In order to meet the evolution of more personalized needs, smart campuses have been born. Faced with such challenges, Qinghai University (hereinafter referred to as "Qingda") adopted Ruijie Network's minimalist overall solution for colleges and universities, giving full play to the technical characteristics of minimalist network openness and integration, and built a multi-operator win-win cooperation platform through flat architecture and authentication and billing transformation, virtualized network, intelligent routing, full network integrated authentication and other advanced technologies, creating a solid and reliable new generation of smart network for smart campuses and mobile applications in the new era.

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Promoting the construction of smart campuses, network upgrades sound the prelude

"Qingdao University" is located in the ancient plateau city - the summer capital Xining. It was founded in 1958. In 2008, it became a key construction university of the national "211 Project". In 2016, it became one of the first 100 national innovation and entrepreneurship demonstration schools. In 2017, it was selected as a national "World's Best Disciplines" construction university.

With the continuous deepening of information technology applications such as big data, Internet of Things, Internet+, and mobile Internet, information technology has been deeply integrated with Qingdao University's education and teaching, scientific research, management, and life, and has become an important support for the development of the school. In recent years, Qingdao University has continued to invest in the construction of educational informatization, and has built an information campus with a 10G backbone network as the basic platform, campus network applications as the main line, and the purpose of sharing educational resources and improving the modernization level of education and teaching. The campus has a 10G backbone Ethernet and a 1G switching to the desktop, which can achieve interconnection with CERNET 300M and 3G interconnection with operators. A total of about 87 kilometers of optical cables have been laid, connecting 6 campuses, 117 buildings, a total of more than 17,900 information points, more than 1,200 wireless AP access points, more than 700 switching devices, and more than 60 various application service systems.

Challenges faced during construction

With the further advancement of network construction and innovative applications, Qingdao University's campus network will once again face the problem of upgrading and transformation. According to the comprehensive plan, this campus network upgrade and transformation project needs to solve the following application and management problems, thereby paving the way for the construction of a smart campus.

1. With the expansion of campus network scale and the complexity of business traffic, the existing system compatibility and scalability of campus network can no longer meet the needs of various application growth;

2. The campus wireless network is still in its early stages of construction. The main campus student area and the other three campuses have not yet achieved full campus wireless network coverage; and the campus mobile application services need to be expanded, and wired/wireless integrated authentication and security management have not yet been fully realized;

3. Information business systems are independent of each other and lack collaboration, and school-wide data sharing, unified identity authentication, and unified portal management have not been achieved;

4. There is a lack of intelligent, real-time, and visual network automatic monitoring and management, and network application control strategies cannot meet information security needs; some Internet access areas are unable to formulate detailed bandwidth management strategies based on user identity and application.

The minimalist solution is recognized, and network capabilities are comprehensively advanced

After program review and product testing, Qinghai University finally adopted the minimalist campus network solution provided by Ruijie Networks. Under the concept of minimalist design, minimalist management, and open compatibility, it improves services for the information department of Qinghai University, satisfies the application experience of teachers and students, and provides an accelerator for the informationization transformation of education and teaching.

◆ Comprehensive improvement of network performance, flattening boosts management efficiency

The core area of ​​Qingdao University's data center uses Ruijie RG-N18000 (Newton) Newton series cloud architecture core switches, which realizes the flat architecture of the entire school network and provides wired and wireless integrated authentication and centralized billing management. As the core gateway and policy distribution center of the entire network, the dual-core switch comprehensively improves reliability and elastic management through virtualization technology, and can meet the expansion requirements of 40G and 100G. At the same time, Qingdao University has also fully utilized the compatibility characteristics of Ruijie switches, interconnecting and centrally controlling the core switches of the original secondary colleges and the switching, routing, billing, authentication and other equipment of other manufacturers, which not only ensures the compatibility of authentication and billing software, but also realizes wired and wireless integrated authentication, providing a super-fast experience for all types of terminals of teachers and students throughout the school.

◆Intelligent network routing and refined management of Internet access strategies

In this network upgrade project, the network export of Qingdao University uses Ruijie RG-PowerAD 9020 load balancing to achieve intelligent link selection at the export. The export router RG-RSR7708-X is linked to Ruijie authentication and billing system RG-SAM+ to achieve on-demand route selection for users and operators across the school, and cooperates with Ruijie RG-ASME anti-agent products to achieve real-name authentication of students in the dormitory area. Among them, the newly added gateway is connected to the flat core gateway through a 10G interface (with a 40G expansion interface reserved), and is intelligently linked with the operator's AAA system to achieve link selection based on the user account operator's attribution attributes, and provides a unified deployment platform for the scenario-based, intelligent, and precise Internet behavior management strategies and charging strategies.

◆Build an integrated authentication platform to remove restrictions on wireless applications

The minimalist solution realizes wired/wireless integrated authentication, solves the authentication island problem of applications such as the one-card system, and meets the needs of large-capacity wireless user authentication through powerful performance output and unique Web noise reduction functions, providing a material and environmental basis for further mining available resources and data analysis results. At the same time, thanks to the compatibility characteristics of Ruijie's flat network structure, the wireless network can be fully compatible with the school's existing and future product brands, avoiding the drawbacks of manufacturer binding.

◆IT operation and maintenance takes the initiative to make the campus network status clear at a glance

In light of the actual situation of Qingdao University's campus network operation and maintenance, Ruijie adopted the "ServiceOne one-stop" approach of "product + consulting + service + training". After in-depth field research and testing, it finally realized the intelligent operation and maintenance of the entire school network. Ruijie RG-RIIL unified operation and maintenance management equipment realizes the monitoring and visual management of all the school's network equipment, security equipment, storage, servers and more than 30 business systems, helping customers solve the problem of difficult operation and maintenance.

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The most beautiful Qingdao University, showing the minimalist style

After years of continuous construction, the informatization of Qinghai University has gradually entered a period of highly complex networks and application systems and continuous expansion from the construction of basic networks and application systems. Director Bai of the Information Center of Qinghai University mentioned that since the deployment of Ruijie's simplified campus network and operation and maintenance solutions, they have been used in the actual live network environment and have been stable and reliable without any problems. Ruijie's products are trustworthy! Along the way, Ruijie Networks and Qinghai University have gradually formed a close partnership through project co-construction, and have worked together to create a landscape of a smart campus in the beautiful Qinghai.