To say David Carr manages a mixed network may be a bit of an understatement. As director of telecommunications and network services for Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. (www.northwestern.edu), Carr oversees a campus infrastructure for 15,000 students and 5,000 faculty and staff members.

Carr describes the communications needs at Northwestern as different from an enterprise environment because of the large economies of scale the university deals with, as well as the diversity of networks and applications. He says the university operates at roughly the same level as a national telecommunications carrier.

The Northwestern communications mesh includes a mixture of plain old telephone service, Internet data and video, and bandwidth-intensive research backbones like Internet2 and National Light Rail. Peering with three different ISPs, the university’s bandwidth usage peaks at 500 Mbps, with steady states of 100 Mbps throughout the year.

“We have to find a level balance between investing in services and investing in items that further the research community,” Carr says. In the short term, this can mean juggling the bandwidth needs of students surfing byte-gobbling Web sites like YouTube, with managing SIP teleconferences between farflung scientific teams.

Cognizant of where technology is headed, Carr and his department are starting to dabble with VoIP. The initial rollout is small, with around 1,000 phones this fall. But Carr sees this as the iterative first step of transforming Northwestern’s voice infrastructure away from traditional PRI trunks. With 18,000 phone lines spread across two large campuses, the phase-in will be daunting.

With very few outages on the university’s network, Carr says he and his 30-person team have inadvertently set the bar pretty high for themselves.

“Having no major outages, this much success raises customer community expectations,” says Carr. “Not having outages sets user expectations very high.”

Three years ago, Carr realized his backbone network operated really well, but he didn’t have any reliable way to measure its performance. So he turned to Chelmsford, Mass.-based Brix Networks (www.brixnet.com), which he had discovered at a 2004 VON conference.

“When I first talked to Brix, they were reselling to carriers. But when I told them about the university’s specific needs, I convinced them we could be a customer.”

Northwestern uses Brix Verify for ongoing operational monitoring. Brix Verify was first installed in a limited fashion on the campus network. Brix technicians came and installed core software on a Sun Solaris box, with BrixWorx scheduling. Eventually, Carr’s team expanded its use to 20 Brix Verify devices in 16 different routing sites.

Carr says putting Brix in place was a no-brainer, allowing Northwestern to easily monitor and maintain a high-quality communications mesh.

“I didn’t put Brix in to solve a problem,” says Carr. “I installed it because I thought it was essential to our future success.”

In the first phase of the project, Northwestern deployed Brix Verifiers, test and monitoring appliances, at each routing location across its campus mesh network. Using the BrixWorx central- site correlation and analysis software engine, Northwestern commissions active (on-demand) test calls from Brix Verifier to Brix Verifier to constantly measure call quality throughout the network infrastructure.

For training, two members of the Northwestern IT staff went to Brix’s Boston offices to learn the BrixWorx software package. The staff at Northwestern’s network operations center monitors the network 24/7 through the BrixWorx software.

“Brix changed the way we do the infrastructure monitoring of our network, constantly creating calls to recognize anomalies. It was the next step forward from managing just elements,” says Carr.

Given the number of phones on the backbone and the number of places that need monitoring services, Carr says performance benchmarks were essential.

“It actually ended up where BrixWorx took care of a problem proactively. It understood the service quality across the infrastructure and let operators recognize issues and resolve them readily. It calls all day long, and recognizes any network degradation immediately,” says Carr.

By establishing key performance indicator (KPI) and MOS thresholds, BrixWorx alerts Northwestern’s IT operations group when call quality thresholds are violated. With integration of BrixWorx into its network management system, the operations group receives alerts to quickly identify issues and take the necessary corrective course of action.

Carr cannot measure the return on investment of using BrixWorx. But in an academic setting where every major network upgrade involves a business case study, getting it right the first time is key. V

Greg Tally can be reached at gtally@vonmag.com.