William & Mary Modernizes its Digital Foundation from Campus to Cloud

A college is like a little town,” says Courtney Carpenter, CIO of The College of William & Mary. “William & Mary has about 6,000 undergraduates, and about 5,000 of them live on campus in resident housing. Classrooms, business offices, and libraries are open during the day, and then at night, students are in their rooms. There’s no downtime. You can’t run a university today without a robust network.” To meet the expectations of round-the-clock operations, along with an explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, William & Mary refreshed its campus network with Juniper Networks solutions.

Keeping up with the digital demands of learning, student and faculty expectations for great connectivity, and the growth of IoT devices demands a robust infrastructure. William & Mary, a Juniper Networks customer for more than a decade, decided to refresh its campus network. “Uptime is critical,” says network engineer Scott Fenstermacher.

“As network people, we like to maintain a quality of life balance. We don’t like to come in nights and weekends. Juniper delivers the reliability we need.”

A lot has changed since Thomas Jefferson read law at William & Mary. “Data demands have been growing linearly for the past 10 or 15 years,” says Morledge. William & Mary’s new campus network easily weathers the spike when a new episode of Game of Thrones is released or when students rush to register for classes.

With the access switching upgraded, the team is planning to upgrade from a 10GbE core infrastructure to 40GbE. “We’re planning for the future, and with our EX Series switches, we can easily convert 1 gig uplinks to 10 gig where we see greater demand for bandwidth,” Morledge says. “Our investment is protected.”

“Students and professors come to campus expecting that all of their devices work,” says Carpenter. “They just expect the network to work. And with Juniper, it does.”