AMU Computer Network Upgrade and Expansion
Arba Minch University (AMU) will soon open three new campuses. One hosts the Faculty of Health Sciences, the second the Faculty of Agriculture, and the third the Faculty of Business Economics. The campuses are spread over the Secha and Sikella sub-towns of Arba Minch, and are several kilometers separated from each other and from the main campus north of Sikella.Inter-campus fiber network
A dedicated Fiber Optic Network has been contracted from Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC) that will allow AMU to interconnect its campuses at Gigabit-per-second speed. ETC is in the process of installing this network.
The Cisco equipment to interconnect the campuses, and to create a network distribution and access layer over all buildings of the new campuses, has been procured over the past months in several tenders. By procuring pre-used Cisco equipment from the USA, the acquisition costs of this network have been kept very low.
Challenges
“The challenges by our University Transformation process are large and manyfold”, says Dr Tarekegn Tadesse Tanga, President of AMU.”AMU grows at a rate of 4000 students per year over the last and the next three years. At the same time, we focus our educational emphasis on Science and Technology, because these disciplines will account for 70% of our student population by 2012.
Thanks to our strong building construction efforts from mid 2008 onwards, the basic building infrastructure for the new campuses is already nearing completion.
By January 2010, a number of the buildings there will start to be used. The ETC fiber installations and AMU’s network equipment acquisition are now enabling us to create some 2000 new computer network connections spread out over these campuses, right from the start.”
Cost-saving approach
The investment to achieve the computer network expansion would have been prohibitive if AMU had procured new Cisco equipment. Over 9 Million ETB would have been involved, much of which would have had to be paid in US dollars, a foreign currency that is presently scarce in Ethiopia.Pre-owned equipment
“We have resorted to a process that made a tremendous saving on foreign exchange expenditure”, says Ato Yosef Shiferaw, Head of the ICT Coordination Office at AMU.“Rather than procuring new Cisco equipment, we have tendered via the Internet for pre-owned Cisco hardware that is slightly newer than the existing AMU network hardware.
A number of US-based brokers of pre-used equipment have competed in these tenders, and two of them have won the supply of the required equipment at a fraction of the dollar cost that we would have paid for new equipment.”
Suppliers
The two companies were BIZI International of Tyngsboro, MA, and Teksavers Inc of Austin, TX.
BIZI has supplied 3 powerful Cisco 6506 Core Switches, each equipped with (amongst others) dual power supplies and dual Supervisor Engines for resilience.
These Core Switches will be used in the high-speed distribution network between the campuses.
Teksavers and BIZI further supplied a total of 41 Cisco Access switches with 48 computer ports each, with the required GBics and fiber patch cables for the access network for about 2000 new PC-locations.
Next steps
Most of the equipment will start to be deployed only from January 2010 onwards.But a part of it will already be used immediately. Several hundreds of the new ports are required for the original campus, following a recently completed significant fiber installation that connected buildings and PC laboratories that were not networked until now.
Also, as the new core switches are more powerful than the existing ones, and as expansion of the existing switches with more fiber connections was dearly needed, two of the new switches have effectively been swapped with the two existing ones within a week from their arrival at AMU.
This first step in the implementation of the overall inter-campus network design has thereby instantly created increased network connectivity and resilience.
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