Leading Health and Life Sciences University relies on Avaya Networking solutions to deliver performance, reliability and business continuity.

1. University of the Sciences
Leading Health and Life Sciences University
relies on Avaya Networking solutions to deliver
performance, reliability and business continuity
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – For nearly two centuries, University of
the Sciences (USciences) has been preparing students to shape the
science of health, offering a wide range of life and health sciences
disciplines. The network that supports the school’s approximately
3,000 students and 1,000 staff and faculty members was recently
upgraded with products from the Avaya Virtual Services Platform
(VSP) 9000 and the Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 ranges.
This upgrade delivered significant improvements in network
performance, uptime and reliability.
Meeting the Needs of a
21st Century University
Cutting-edge Avaya infrastructure
solutions support increasing
demands on the network
The USciences Information Technology
department faces a challenge common
to most universities – meeting ever-
increasing demands for services and
applications while providing high
network availability.
“Uptime is one of the key issues,”
explains John Masciantonio, executive
director of Information Technology at
USciences. “These days, technology is
considered a utility just like plumbing
and electricity, people are simply not
willing to put up with a lot of outages.
There are also increased demands on the
network due to factors such as the
proliferation of mobile devices, access to
avaya.com | 1
Challenges
• Improve overall
performance and
speed of the
network
• Add redundancy to
the network to
ensure business
continuity
• Meet increased
demands for
applications and
services
Value Created
Significant
improvements in
network performance:
- Performance from
the end points
doubled
- Capacity and
bandwidth
doubled
• Diversified, future-
proof network that
provides maximum
uptime and
reliability, will serve
University’s needs
well into the future
• Dramatically
improved support
for cloud-based
applications, mobile
devices and the
University’s
distance-learning
program
• Capacity to
seamlessly support
newly installed
campus VoIP system

2. the Internet and video-intensive
applications. Add to that the access
incoming students have had to
technology at home and in their high
schools, and universities have a lot to
keep up with.”
Given the advanced age of the
University’s core network,
Masciantonio and his team undertook
an extensive upgrade project with the
goals of achieving the highest
availability possible and diversifying
the network. To that end, they
deployed a solution comprising the
Avaya Virtual Services Platform 9000
and Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch
5500 and 5600 Series products.
“We’ve been looking to diversify our
network for a long time. Our primary
Data Center is in the basement of the
oldest building on campus, so we
needed to get away from a single
point-of-failure,” says Masciantonio.
“The best solution was to move to the
Avaya VSP 9000 platform and
duplicate that at another location on
campus. We also implemented
Avaya’s Switching Cluster technology
so that one catastrophic situation
wouldn’t cripple us.” Switch Clustering
is one of several high-availability,
high-performance, and virtualization-
enabling technologies offered as part
of Avaya’s Virtual Enterprise Network
Architecture (VENA) framework.
Supporting Critical Applications
The network upgrade has been a
boon to several recently deployed
applications, such as the hosted,
cloud-based Blackboard learning
management system. Lecture
Capture is also very popular with
students. It records class sessions and
makes them available to students for
playback. This high-volume video
capture places much greater
demands on the network.
Another driver behind the upgrade is
the sheer amount of wireless devices
on the network - 400-500 students
have Apple iPad devices and almost
all of them have laptops.
USciences also moved to a hybrid IP
Phone system in concert with the
deployment of Avaya VSP 9000, and
as Masciantonio notes, the upgrade
has been critical to the success of the
new VoIP solution. “It all comes back
to uptime and reliability, people
expect to have a phone system
available at all times.”
In addition, USciences is actively
growing its online learning presence
in order to broaden its potential
student base and remain competitive.
The network upgrade will be key in
supporting the increased demands of
the distance-learning program. Often,
online learners are non-traditional
students who are not in close
proximity to the school and are likely
to be doing asynchronous course
work outside of traditional IT support
hours. They could even be in different
parts of the country or the world.
When these students are trying to
access USciences’ resources,
regardless of the time of day, those
resources need to be available,
seamlessly.
A reliable, high-speed, future-
proof network
For Long Le, director of Computing
and Network Services at USciences,
peace of mind is one of the biggest
benefits of the network upgrade. “A
major goal of this upgrade is high-
availability. Adding redundancy to the
2 | avaya.com
“In networking, there’s
no hiding the bad
news. Success for us is
no complaints, and any
past complaints have
gone away since we
implemented the
Avaya solution.”
—John Masciantonio,
executive director of
Information Technology
at USciences

3. avaya.com | 3
network gives us that peace of mind, if anything happens in the
original NOC, the network won’t go down.”
The Avaya Switch Cluster solution has doubled the
performance from the end-points, with each of the 20 campus
buildings doubling its capacity to the core. As Masciantonio
describes, this results in cost savings for the organization.
“We don’t have to implement a separate solution to increase
our network speed, we’ve already accomplished that by
beefing up the core and putting Switch Clustering in place.”
The network upgrade also doubled capacity and increased
bandwidth to 2Gbps per building. And the VSP 9000 is the
only solution on the market that provides active/active cores,
which ensures that all of the available capacity is actively
available, all of the time, maximizing the return on investment.
This solution is also extremely flexible, for example, a
dormitory that has a particularly large number of power users
can now easily be supplied with up to 20Gbps.
Masciantonio reports that traffic on the network has increased
since the upgrade, but there have been no bottlenecks or
performance issues. He adds: “In networking, there’s no hiding
the bad news. Success for us is no complaints, and any past
complaints have gone away since we implemented the Avaya
solution.”
Mark Nestor, USciences CIO, comments, “I am very pleased to
have the Avaya solution in place. The reliability it provides frees
up my time to focus on other, more pressing, issues.”
The university is currently constructing a new building and
implementing new programs, both of which were factors in
the network upgrade. “Future-proofing the network is
definitely something we took into consideration, we wanted a
solution that had a long lifespan that we wouldn’t need to
change out in a couple of years, and we got that with Avaya.”
Learn More
For more information, contact your Avaya Account Manager
or a member of the Avaya Connect channel partner program,
or access other collaterals by clicking on Resource Library at
www.avaya.com.
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10GB MM fiber
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USciences Network Simplified w/ Passports
Data
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Griffith Hall Server Farm
USciences Network Simplified w/ VSPs & SMLTs
Virtual Services Platform9000
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4. © 2013 Avaya Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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04/13 • DN7259
ABOUT UNIVERSITY OF THE SCIENCES
At University of the Sciences, students embark on a challenging learning experience
in a proving ground for successful professionals in the science and healthcare-
related fields. A private institution dedicated to education, research, and service,
and distinguished as the nation’s first college of pharmacy, the University has
produced leaders in the science and healthcare marketplaces since its founding in
1821. Students in USciences’ five colleges learn to excel in scientific analysis and to
apply their skills to improving healthcare in the lives of people worldwide through
such disciplines as pharmacy, biology, physical therapy, healthcare business, and
health policy. For more information, visit usciences.edu.
About Avaya
Avaya is a global
provider of business
collaboration and
communications
solutions, providing
unified communications,
contact centers,
networking and related
services to companies
of all sizes around
the world. For more
information please visit
www.avaya.com.
Systems and Applications
• Avaya Virtual Services Platform 9000
• Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 range
4 | avaya.com