Aruba Networks today said it is powering the University of Miami and sister organizations for a wireless network upgrade.
The wireless upgrade covers 200 buildings and 11 million square feet of the University’s three main campuses, as well as UHealth’s three hospitals and two dozen outpatient facilities.
The main aim of deploying the Aruba infrastructure is to address the increase in mobile devices within the campus and support a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy.
The multi-location campus serves more than 15,000 students and the medical center has 40 buildings across 72 acres.
The organization has deployed Aruba mobility controllers, the Aruba 130 Series APs and the AirWave Network Management system. To date, the institution has installed approximately 2,300 Aruba APs, with another 4,000 planned over the next twelve months.
They are also in the process of configuring Aruba’s ClearPass Access Management System and will use ClearPass to enable BYOD.
The University expects 50 percent of the upgrade to be completed by the end of the summer, with the remaining areas covered in phases over the next two years.
In addition, the organization has just announced plans to open a new, 200,000-square-foot outpatient facility that will be upgraded with Aruba infrastructure.
The institution will also provide wireless network coverage for major new buildings on campus including a School of Music, a Marine School, and a unique research and science facility that incorporates three stories of water to study weather patterns and storm impact.
Brad Rohrer, deputy CIO for Information Technology, University of Miami, said: “We suspect that more than 25,000 devices are connecting to our network daily and we’ve seen peaks as high as 18,000 devices simultaneously on the network.”
Future plans for the academic environment revolve primarily around BYOD, where the University wants to allow students, faculty, and staff to self-configure their personal devices to the network without IT involvement, while maintaining security and HIPAA requirements.
The organization is also looking to roll out 802.11ac in the near future.
Rohrer says he expects that about 40 percent of the 4,000 additional APs that they will deploy in the next year will be 802.11ac APs.
Additional plans for the future include Microsoft Lync for Unified Communications, as the institution believes that its new wireless infrastructure will enable it to move away from expensive investments in telecommunications and voice products.
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