Creating a Better Student Experience

Challenges

Internet outages were becoming increasingly problematic. This led RACC to evaluate their current internet architecture and engage Weidenhammer as their partner. The objective was to design a reliable, redundant internet platform which ensures high availability and minimal disruption to students, faculty, staff and classes.

Solutions

Working with RACC Weidenhammer was able to provide a solution that included:

• Replacing the existing ASA 5525 firewall with Cisco 2130 next generation firewalls deployed in a single, high availability pair
• Implementing Cisco’s Firepower security solution on the new firewalls
• Deploying Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous systems on the internet
• Increasing the availability of their internet service—a key benefit for students who can now reach student online resources

…it was a pleasure working with Weidenhammer on the design and implementation of this solution. I have always found Weidenhammer’s engineers able to understand our challenges, design a solution to meet our needs and deliver on the implementation…

Anderson Forrest, CIO

Results

Since a new internet solution has been developed and parameters defined, the results show

• RACC now has a high availability internet solution designed to fit their needs
• Redundant firewalls and system configuration allowing for primary and secondary internet providers with failover
• Automatic funneling—when one service provider goes down, internet traffic is automatically funneled to the alternate service provider allowing for seamless productivity and connectivity
• Uptime is increased for students, faculty and staff