The College's current environment primarily consists of two data centers in two different locations, the primary data center in the Progress Avenue campus and the secondary data center on the Morningside campus. These two locations provide core services to the other five campuses in GTA.
The College supports over 45,000 students and 2,500 staff and faculty with the average person having about three IP addresses or devices resulting in over 140,000 IP addresses used. The network uses five public class C networks and performs NAT (Network Address Translation) on internal systems. The majority of systems connected to the campus network use Private IP addresses, with NAT to external Real IP’s performed by the Internet edge firewall devices. The College hosts many external facing web applications and services and they are primarily configured behind Cisco ASA systems in the primary data center in Progress campus.
The campus network shares an aggregate of 20 Gbps of Internet bandwidth provided by one ISP provider. The primary data center has 20 Gbps from GTANet. The secondary data center has a 2 Gbps connection back to the Progress Campus provided by Cogeco Wan Services. Total average Internet bandwidth consumption is approximately 3-5 Gbps. The solution should assume a growth of 100% per two years (approximately).
The College has 2 primary edge firewalls that consist of Cisco ASA 5585 firewalls set up in an active-standby configuration with the active and standby in the primary data center.
These then connect into the network core, which consists of four Cisco 6500 configured in a mesh topology. The distribution and access layer switches are also Cisco and Aruba HP and are dual-homed for redundancy. The College also has a wireless network that consists of 1400 access points.
Internally, servers consist of Windows, UNIX and Linux environments with other dedicated appliances/systems such as Cisco ACS. The College also has many databases consisting of Oracle, MySQL and MSSQL.
