How Xiamen University Malaysia Built a Fast, Green and Secure Campus Network

Technology now shapes most of daily life, changing how people communicate, travel, relax and work. Higher education has been caught up in the same shift, and spending on new and advanced technology by colleges and universities has climbed quickly in recent years.

For these institutions, the gains show up in several places: greater efficiency, processes that work better, and an easier time for students and staff alike.

Xiamen University's campus in Sepang, a federal constituency in Selangor, Malaysia, shows what a university can do when it adopts technology across the board, with modern facilities and new ideas built in from the start. Opened in 2015, Xiamen University Malaysia was the first overseas campus of any Chinese university. It offers a wide selection of full-time undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in literature, business, science, engineering and medicine.

The site spans 150 acres and has 470,000 square metres of floor space. After years of construction and development it has more than 5,000 students, striking architecture and a full set of facilities. Its demands on information and communications technology (ICT), both in building the systems and in operations and maintenance (O&M), are high: network capacity, wireless coverage indoors, high-bandwidth access and an advanced data centre.

What the campus network had to deliver

As a new Chinese higher education institution outside China, the university set out from the beginning to build a stable, dependable information infrastructure for lecturers and students. The aim was to pair first-rate teaching staff with excellent facilities so students could do well in an outstanding learning environment.

The campus was therefore planned so that information could move quickly and without obstruction across many kinds of space: lecturers' and administrative offices, smart classrooms, multimedia rooms, laboratories, dormitories, student unions, canteens, the library, theatre halls and sports venues.

Places where large crowds gather are exactly where a fast, smooth network is hardest to maintain. Meeting that demand meant dense deployment and Wi-Fi access for a very large number of users. Offices and dormitories needed a high-speed network able to carry several key services, stay highly reliable and be simple to maintain. Building a data centre that could be rolled out fast, deployed in phases and managed easily, while using less energy, was another major challenge in putting the campus ICT together.

Like any business dealing with the pressures of the data era, a genuinely modern "smart" campus has to supply connectivity in the right place, at the right bandwidth and at the right moment. For the university this matters because good education now depends on sharing resources and on more personalised learning that students can do at any time and from anywhere.

Huawei's network build

Xiamen turned to Huawei, which has more than 30 years of experience in networking and builds products designed for interconnection.

A smart campus is impossible without reliable, flexible, high-speed coverage, and that foundation came from a 10GB/s network, capable of reaching 100 GB/s, sized for the most bandwidth-intensive academic work.

The Wi-Fi design provides coverage tailored to different settings, including classrooms, auditoriums, meeting rooms, dormitories and the sports centre.

Huawei's fully programmable switches let the university run wired and wireless networks side by side on the new campus, apply one set of user policies across the whole network and keep it secure. An agile controller handles both fixed and mobile networks, so users get a consistent service and can connect wherever and whenever they need to.

The individual components the university deployed are technical, but each one accounts for part of what the campus gained:

• AirEngine Wi-Fi 6: brings together Wi-Fi 6 technology derived from Huawei's 5G work and its all-scenario Wi-Fi, built on smart antennas, three radio frequencies and distributed Wi-Fi. Whether someone is in an area packed with devices or in a full theatre hall, they get good-quality free Wi-Fi anywhere on campus.
• CampusInsight: applies artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse fault modes, predict faults and prevent them in advance, giving staff and students the best possible Wi-Fi and making O&M highly efficient.
• S57/S127 series switches: a high-performance design with GE access, 10G aggregation and a 100G core, supporting a large number of users and heavy concurrent traffic.
• CSS2/iStack/LAG: keeps the access, aggregation and core layers reliable end to end, giving the university a highly dependable network design.
• Wired and wireless convergence: authenticates wired and wireless users in a single way, uses ZTP for zero-configuration service delivery and relies on AC3.0 to manage network and security policies in one place.
• Huawei Wi-Fi and IoT solution: builds a smart campus network able to sense everything and support big data, and speeds up Internet of Things (IoT) roll-out by combining RFID, ZigBee and Bluetooth modules.

A modular data centre on site

Cloud adoption keeps growing, but data centres have not disappeared. Needs vary from one organisation to the next, and many combine on-premises infrastructure with the cloud to get the advantages of each.

Running on premises usually means owning a data centre. That no longer has to involve a very large investment in a full-scale facility: current designs can be portable and modular, and they place a far lighter load on the environment.

This next-generation approach is what Xiamen University Malaysia set out to adopt with Huawei's help.

Huawei's modular data centre is built from modules that are prefabricated and pre-commissioned at the factory. Against a conventional data centre, it cuts deployment time by 50%. It can be deployed on demand and expanded flexibly, and it supports cloud computing workloads, which helps the campus grow quickly.

Down-flow air conditioning inside the room, combined with cold aisle containment, makes cooling more efficient and lowers electricity bills. A highly efficient modular UPS with a 2N design keeps the power supply highly reliable.

The NetEco intelligent management system brings the equipment room environment under unified management. Its intelligent operations make O&M simpler and shorten the time it takes.

Campus applications, virtual labs available around the clock and high-performance computing all run quickly and stably on the modular data centre, serving the present and future teaching and research needs of staff and students.

Room to grow

With this foundation in place, the university could adapt flexibly as demands changed over time.

One example is its all-in-one card applications and a central control system covering every classroom, both of which depend on the data network and the data centre. A lecturer now inserts an all-in-one card into a slot to switch on every device in the room. If something goes wrong, IT staff can check device status remotely, place calls straight away and fix the problem quickly.

Lecturers and students also use the same card to pay for things and to identify themselves around the campus.

In September the university marked the graduation of its first cohort. More students are expected to arrive, from Asia and from around the world, to study at the campus.

Huawei says it will keep working closely with Xiamen University on new technology, bringing smart, safe and green campus solutions, products and services to build top-tier information infrastructure for Xiamen University and for other higher education institutions in Malaysia.