Agile Education Metropolitan Area Network Helps Ulan Qab Education Modernization

By deploying Huawei's Agile Education Metropolitan Area Network, Wulanchabu Education Bureau has broken the uneven distribution of educational resources, enriched the teaching methods, promoted the sharing of teaching resources, and greatly improved the teaching effect and quality.

Background of the project

Wulanchabu City administers 11 flag county areas with a total area of ​​54,500 square kilometers and a total population of 2.87 million. It is a minority area with Mongolian as the main body and Han majority. In recent years, the overall informationization of Wulanchabu City has developed rapidly, and the cloud computing center built by Huawei Company in Wulanchabu City has also been officially put into operation. However, one fact that cannot be ignored is that Wulanchabu City still has a great imbalance in the education informationization. Some Qixian County have already built the Qixian Education Metropolitan Area Network, which has realized the class and school. Pass, but some flag counties are still blank. In order to solve the imbalanced distribution of educational resources in Wulanchabu City and improve the level of education informatization, the Wulanchabu Education Bureau plans to access the Huawei Cloud Computing Center by constructing an educational metropolitan area network covering the major primary and secondary schools in the city.

Wulanchabu City Education Metropolitan Area Network Construction Requirements

In order to meet the growth of the educational network business system bandwidth and access scale in a few years, the Wulanchabu Education Bureau needs to build an advanced, forward-looking and highly reliable IP metropolitan area network as a unified backbone communication platform. The education department can quickly launch a series of new educational information services for broadband multimedia applications.

First of all, it is necessary to unify the self-built Internet exports of the primary and secondary schools in Qixian County of Wulanchabu to the Municipal Education Bureau to build an independent, safe and reliable metropolitan area network outlet;

Second, it is necessary to establish a unified certification platform for all educational institutions in the city, to achieve the identity security guarantee for the city's teachers and students to access educational resources, and to provide more and more teachers and students in the city, such as cross-school exchanges, students and parents' off-campus visits. Service experience guarantee when accessing different modes in different regions;

Finally, while connecting schools, it is also necessary to take into account security, to avoid the spread of viruses or attacks between different schools, and to effectively ensure the security and smooth flow of the entire education system business.

Huawei solution

Through grassroots research, Huawei has proposed the construction mode of “public cloud + education metropolitan area network” according to the status quo of education informationization in Wulanchabu City, saving tens of millions of data center costs for the Education Bureau and getting the education bureau’s highly recognition. The network architecture of the solution is divided into two layers: the core layer and the access layer. The S12700 agile switch is used as the backbone device in the core layer. The unified user management features are used to authenticate and access the teachers and students in the city. The primary school is connected to the S5700 series switches and connected to the core device through the firewall USG6500. Use the next-generation firewall for security isolation protection at the Internet exit, and deploy professional VPN devices to achieve remote access for parents and students.

The program adopts hierarchical design and draws on the industry-leading SDN software to define the network. It has advanced features such as forward-looking, business agility and stereo security:

The forward-looking architecture supports the high-speed core backbone network of SDN: the backbone equipment adopts Huawei high-performance agile switches, and the core nodes of the network use 10 Gigabit link connections to provide strong service bearer and capacity expansion for the future. At the same time, the agile switch adopts a fully programmable design architecture, which can quickly support the new protocol through a custom forwarding process. The powerful service expansion capability can meet the needs of the rapid development of the Wulanchabu Education Metropolitan Area Network in the next 5-10 years.

Business travel, ensuring a consistent business access experience for teachers: Drawing on the idea of ​​centralized control of SDN, in the metropolitan area network, through the Controller to identify all users in the school, education bureau, remote access parents and students, and with the core agile The switches, next-generation firewalls, and security access gateways implement centralized management and control of network authority, service priority, and bandwidth policies. When the leaders of the Education Bureau visit the city, they will observe the inter-school demonstration classes. When students are visiting at school or at home, they use the same account to access the educational resource sharing platform, with the same access control rights, business priorities and bandwidth. These policies will be managed by the Controller and follow the users to ensure users are on the network. The business experience of internal access is consistent.

Dynamic allocation of security resources and implementation of three-dimensional security protection: Security isolation and daily attack prevention can be provided through firewalls deployed at the entrances of schools and data centers. High-performance next-generation firewalls deployed at Internet outlets have advanced application security capabilities, such as attack prevention. IPS, anti-virus, online behavior auditing, etc., while implementing Internet export protection as a security resource center for the entire metropolitan area network, you can use tunnel technology to orchestrate suspicious traffic through the controller, and drain to the security resource center for advanced security protection as needed. Thereby achieving dynamic application security. For example, the traffic of the teacher visiting the data center can be diverted to the security resource center for virus detection, application attack detection, and access behavior audit. This approach will effectively reuse next-generation firewall security resources and reduce construction and management costs.

Highly reliable, providing a sustainable education information service: Eliminate single points of failure through a fully redundant structure including device redundancy, link redundancy, routing redundancy, etc., and fully guarantee the high reliability of the overall wide area backbone network. . The core backbone equipment uses CSS2 hardware cluster technology to realize network virtualization to simplify network management. At the same time, through 1+N backup technology, as long as one master control works normally, the entire core can be guaranteed to work normally, and the core backbone can be reliably operated.

Wulanchabu City Education Metropolitan Area Network Value

After the completion of the Wulanchabu Education Metropolitan Area Network project, more than 100 primary and secondary schools and more than 3,000 classes covered by the 11 flag counties will fully enjoy the advantages brought by the advanced network, realize the teaching office automation and student status management. System, interactive classroom, online on-demand, online communication, online test evaluation, online communication, e-book package and many other teaching management applications. The completion of the Wulanchabu Education Metropolitan Area Network not only enriched the local teaching methods, but also promoted the sharing of teaching resources, and greatly improved the teaching effect and quality.