Case Study - University of Montana
The University of Montana is a multi-campus university with one main campus, three affiliated campuses, and nearly a dozen subsidiary locations throughout Western Montana. It is an energetic and dynamic university committed to leading the way in higher education and research.
The Network
The centralized network support team looks after the connectivity needs of over 17,500 student, faculty, and administration clients. They are currently using Easy-IP to proactively manage their IP address space for over 14,000 devices, across all campuses and remote research facilities.
Easy-IP, which was implemented by the Network Services group at the University of Montana, monitors 3 ATM switches, 250 Cisco Managed Switches, 40 Cisco routers, 20 servers and 200 hubs. The total number of possible IP addresses within their network that Easy-IP manages exceeds 16 million.
The Past
Prior to investing in Easy-IP, The University of Montana was using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of their IP addressing scheme. Easy-IP was chosen because it was easy to use and exceptionally quick to roll out.
They claimed that in just a few days, they were able to use Easy-IP to help plan out their conversion from Public to Private IP addressing involving all of the RFC 1918 private address space plus 1 full class B network, 1/2 Class B network and multiple Class C networks.
The Present
The University of Montana has been a Easy-IP user for over 3 years and they use the product for 3 core purposes.
Firstly, the application is used for overall IP Address planning. Secondly, the application is used to keep track of adds/moves and changes for the entire IP address network space. Thirdly, Easy-IP is used as a proactive troubleshooting tool, especially to verify DNS hostnames to IP addresses.
The Future
In future, the network team at The University of Montana aim to use Easy-IP's SNMP auto-discovery to keep track of all installed network equipment and to help streamline their migration to IPv6.
