Dean College in Franklin, Mass., got a relatively early start in wireless networking, offering access to faculty and students in the late 1990s. A decade or so later, rising network demands brought on by video and social media left the network in need of some major upgrades, reports Jennifer Lawinski at CIOInsight.

The college's CIO, Darrell Kulesza, who took over in 2008, started by tasking the IT Services director with evaluating all of the infrastructure and systems across the campus. 

"Our phone system [was] antiquated and old. Every time there was a lightning strike we lost $8,000 because something blew up somewhere," said Russell Prentice, IT Services director, adding that college officials were eager to move to voice-over-IP. "The problem with VoIP is that the college infrastructure, the wiring infrastructure, wasn't good enough."

Last summer, the college underwent a campus-wide wiring upgrade and deployed a much-improved wireless network. Now there is Wi-Fi access throughout the campus, and the college can manage the traffic because it passes through the Wi-Fi firewall.

With new infrastructure deployed, Kulesza needed to re-examine data back-up and disaster recovery options. He ended up building a satellite data center and copying data over from the primary data center. The storage platform was upgraded, and to lower power usage the SAN and virtualized servers were upgraded as well.

"When I got here in 2008 it was not uncommon for the network to go down, or for parts of the campus not to get to the network," Kulesza said. "In the two years that I've been here working with Russ, we've been able to really stabilize the network and provide an environment that's secure and that is reliable, and all the while trying to move the college ahead from a technology perspective and in trying to reduce the cost in all of that."

The college invested $1.5 million in the infrastructure upgrade and disaster recovery initiative. In turn, it has reduced its IT spending by lowering hardware replacement expenses and reducing the cost of the wireless network.

For more:
- see Jennifer Lawinski's article at CIOUpdate

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