Featured Site: TSN 72 Nelson mandela Metropolitan University

TSN 72 is the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in the friendly city of Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. Here is what Bruce Smith has to say:

NMMU and SANREN

NMMU and the predecessors institutions, PE Technikon and UPE, have always tried to be on the bleeding edge of information technology. Some examples of this include being one of the first to switch to Microsoft domains, innovative web sites that won awards and many others.

It is this innovative and creative culture that enabled us to leap at the chance to not only join the SANReN at an early date, but to volunteer to host the Port Elizabeth PoP as well. Since we joined the network at 1Gbps, we made good use of this vast wellspring of data throughout the university.

With our old connections, a separate staff and student line at 4Mbps each, we had to limit the usage quite significantly in order to provide a useable service to all of our staff. All these limits were removed as soon as SANReN came alive for us and our staff and students have revelled in the possibilities of unlimited internet.

Lecturers immediately began using online resources like Youtube and Google Video in their course materials to enrich the learning experience. Voice and video chat allowed our users to communicate with the rest of the world with great ease.

One of our flagship projects was the highly successful video broadcast of our 2010 graduation ceremonies to the rest of the world. Family, friends and interested parties from Zimbabwe and China to Germany and Australia were able to watch our proud graduates cross the stage and receive their degrees. Feedback from the viewers was overwhelming and this year we have plans to extend the experience.

Another ongoing project leveraging the SANReN and the knowledge of TENET’s technical staff is the deployment of IPv6 across our network. With the wise aid of Andrew, Patrick and the rest, we have smoothly introduced IPv6 to our edge networks and are preparing to extend this to the rest of the network within the next three months. While NMMU is not the groundbreaker in this area, we are far ahead of the commercial internet providers in South Africa and most of the world.

An incomplete list of other projects utilizing SANReN includes linking our telephone system to Stellenbosch via SIP gateways; video broadcasting of lectures to remote sites; providing desperately needed connectivity to schools in the PE area via wireless networks and deploying campus-wide wireless networks to allow our students and staff to work from anywhere on our grounds.

Finally, a few statistics on our infrastructure and requirements. We have six campuses across PE and George linked by fiber optics, high-speed wireless and commercial WAN links. Those campuses support over 5000 computers services 25000 students and nearly 2500 staff with 24 hour access in most areas. We are built on Cisco equipment and have well over 6000 network ports across the network. We sustain 110Mbps international traffic and 350Mbps national traffic during peak hours and handle well over a million emails in a month, most of which are spam.