Brocade today announced that The University of São Paulo (USP), the largest public university and research institution in Brazil, is driving advanced communication, business, education, and healthcare applications over its Brocade switching and routing infrastructure. With more than 80,000 students and 6,000 professors on seven distributed campuses, the demand for a performance orientated network is essential to help maintain productivity.

Established in 1934, USP includes 40 educational and research divisions, 43 libraries, five hospitals, five museums, and multiple scientific and cultural centers. The Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan ranks USP in the 78th position for the Top 500 University Rankings for 2009.

To facilitate instruction to its students in diverse areas of study, the University installed more than 41,000 computers and hosts thousands of student owned devices on its Brocade wired and wireless infrastructure. USP's campuses have Brocade Mobility wireless LAN access for its internal network services and the Internet from a variety of locations, including amphitheaters, auditoriums, libraries and leisure areas. The campus is also fully Voice over IP (VoIP)-enabled to help maximize use of its network and lower communication costs.

As a public university, all of USPs infrastructure purchases are put out for public bidding. Having used a combination of Cisco and 3COM equipment in the past, the university selected Brocade technology due to its combination of high-performance and overall cost-efficiency advantages.

“Since we are allocated a set amount of funding, all of our purchases are put out to bid to evaluate the best solution for our needs,” said Prof. Tereza Cristina Carvalho, director of CCE-USP. “After evaluating various vendors, Brocade was able to provide us the best overall price-for-performance, high reliability and one of the lowest total costs of ownership.”

USP deployed 25 NetIron MLX routers to help support the growing need for greater efficiency and increased bandwidth. The NetIron MLX provides one of the industry’s highest 10 gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) port densities, wire-speed performance, and a rich set of IPv4, IPv6, MPLS, VPLS, multi-VRF, and carrier Ethernet capabilities. These routers are ideal for a wide range of advanced applications in university campus backbone networks, Internet edge/aggregation routing, virtualized data centers, large enterprise core, and High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments.

“We are extremely pleased that the University of São Paulo selected Brocade as the foundation of its advanced and distributed campus network,” said Ken Cheng, vice president, IP Products, Brocade. “The high number of users and broad set of applications USP has been able to effectively support while adapting to considerable data traffic growth is truly impressive.”