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UAEU upgraded its data center in the Crescent building in the first two phases of infra-
structure upgrade, continuing UAE University’s promise to deliver ubiquitous, high band-
width connectivity throughout the campus. In phase 3 two more buildings C-series and
F-series were upgraded to keep up-to-date with the advancement in networking tech-
nology and the introduction of features such as internet of things (IoT), 4th generation
access protocols, cloud applications as well as bandwidth hungry gaming application
such as Poke’Mon. This upgrade enables the infrastructure to meet the exorbitant band-
width demands and to satisfy the requirement for ever-present internet connectivity
providing a switching backhaul of 40 Gbps, highly resilient, non-blocking state-of-the-art
infrastructure. The upshot of this change would be a higher bandwidth for the end user
by reducing the bandwidth contention ratio and oversubscription on the uplink.
UAEU Infrastructure upgrade – Phase 3
For the campus, Nexus-7702 40 Gbps switch form the distribution layer while the
Multi-gigabit Catalyst-3850 constitutes the access layer. The Cisco Nexus 7702 switch is
designed to extend the feature richness of the Nexus 7700 family to small and medi-
um-sized deployments. The comprehensive DCI feature set includes Cisco Overlay Trans-
portVirtualization (OTV), Cisco Locator/IDSeparation Protocol (LISP), Cisco IOSMultiproto-
col Label Switching (MPLS), and Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS). The switch is hardware
ready for Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) and Ethernet VPN (EVPN) technologies.
Figure 1: Cisco Nexus 7702 series
Salman Sadiq
October 2017
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