Clemson University deploys an open production-grade OpenStack virtual desktop environment

 
With six different colleges and more than 80 undergraduate majors and 110 graduate degree program serving over 20,000 students, Clemson's IT department has a large and complex job. In addition to providing seamless, secure connectivity and managing a range of IT applications and infrastructure, technology has been a key part of the curriculum.
 
Clemson specially looked for a speedy delivery of course-specific software to students by providing every student with a common virtual desktop environment, a reduced operating complexity of IT staff by allowing them to provision and sandbox applications centrally for entire classes, regardless of size, as well as build a scalable and economical solution to address current and future needs.

Solution
After the transformation to a cloud-based architecture began, Clemson put a strategy in place to leverage an SDN-based networking solution using Edgecore's open network data centers and Big Switch Network's Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) .

As the first OCP-approved 10G/40G switches, Edgecore open network switches with pre-loaded ONIE enable different network operating systems to easily run on top of the Edgecore hardware. 

Big Cloud Fabric's flexible, scale-out design allowed Clemson OpenStack architects to start at the size and scale that satisfied their immediate needs while future-proofing their growth.  Big Cloud Fabric leverages Edgecore Networks' 10G/40G bare-metal switches in a leaf-spine design.
 
The combination of the production-grade OpenStack Orchestration system successfully reduces capex/opex with Edgecore's open network hardware and BCF's SDN approach.