Metropolitan Manchester University (MMU), the second most applied-to tertiary institution in the UK, has selected EfficientIP's SOLIDserver™. The contract was awarded after a three-way tender process to deliver DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI) services to 37,000 students and 4,000 staff members.
Like most universities, MMU has been challenged by the increasing number of connected devices students bring to the campus each day, relying heavily on its IT and networking systems to keep pace with the changes. To ensure students and staff members have access to the network when they need it, and deal with 600 switches handling more than 10,000 IP addresses, MMU had been using a DDI solution from Infoblox. As it approached end-of-support, the university decided to explore additional DDI solutions available on the market, including Infoblox and EfficientIP.
Following the first meeting with EfficientIP and a successful demo of the product, the buying team was very pleased by the capabilities the solution had to offer including visibility, efficiency and search, and decided to make the move.
Commenting on choosing EfficientIP, Justin Michell, Network Engineer of Metropolitan Manchester University, said: “Technically, the easy option would have been to carry on with Infoblox as it would have been a straight upgrade, but financially, it made sense to go with EfficientIP. Their DDI solution was three times cheaper and more feature-rich.” However, EfficientIP engineers’ efficiency and expertise was the biggest win, according to Justin. “The EfficientIP support team is absolutely brilliant. Every time I’ve logged a call, we’ve gotten to the root of the problem. Their team will stay on the phone, even for hours, until they are happy with the outcome – whether it either needs further testing or the problem has been fixed.”
The whole implementation process has taken three months. Although, as Justin pointed out, “the functionality we have at the moment covers everything we need for DNS, DHCP and IPAM and is working nicely,” MMU has also been looking at bolt-on products, notably a dedicated unit for running EfficientIP’s NetChange due to a potential scale in devices. NetChange queries network switches and pulls information on what devices are connected to which interfaces, giving MMU a comprehensive visibility and automated configuration capacity of its network.
