With 130 buildings spread across 145 hectares, Australian National University (ANU) is a major user of IT in all its forms.
When it recently came time for a series of major technological refreshes, however, the university faced a very real issue: what to do with equipment destined for replacement during a series of technological upgrades.
With 1800-pair phone wiring dating back to the 1960s and data networking gear several generations old, there was no question it was time for a change. The gear was "at the end of its physical and economic lifecycle," says John McGee, manager of networks and communications within the ANU Division of Information. "The bulk of our analysis lay around that standard economic analysis. In the case of the voice, it had really reached its limit: we had reached a point of full capacity with an obsolete technology that was starting to constrain service delivery."
All were little more than vestigial remnants after a two-year period during which the ANU and implementation partner HP upgraded its data network from an Asynchronous Transfer Mode environment with shared 10/100Mbps hubs to newer Gigabit Ethernet and 100Mbps switched Ethernet desktops. At the same time, ANU replaced eight aging PABXs with newer VoIP-capable models from Avaya, and upgraded backbone microwave links to run over newly laid fibre-optic cabling.
The net result of these migrations: thousands of telephone handsets, kilometres of decades-old telephone cabling, and aging data cabling, hubs, and switches were suddenly left without a purpose.
Dealing with its PABXs was relatively straightforward: although license restrictions make it difficult to recover anywhere near the purchase price of a PABX, ANU moved the boxes into the second-hand market and was able to recover the cost of the hardware itself. VoIP handsets are being phased in gradually -- around half the 8500 end points on the campus are now VoIP-enabled -- with older handsets relocated to accommodation areas within the university.
Aging hubs, switches, and other networking gear proved harder to palm off: local schools had already moved past the technology ANU was offering. Such equipment, which could find no new home within ANU, was disposed of through an established green recycling process managed by the university.
Not all was lost, however. While the hundreds of kilometres of aging telephone cable spanning the university were unable to support new technologies, ANU found a new use for them: as an emergency backup network in lifts and other places. That network is backed up by a generator and will be maintained for years to come, with rationalisation of phones onto the VoIP network allowing future repairs to be made with smaller telephony cabling that reflects the reduced traffic load.
"It was a conscious strategy that will extend the infrastructure for the next five to ten years," says McGee. "We're moving to an asset management strategy that gets away from the forklift changeover."
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• Case study: leftovers more than academic for ANU
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