With 82,000 students, Arizona State University (ASU) prioritizes security. The Open Daylight platform and the open methodology allow the top-ranked research university to collaborate with other educational institutions, install an open flow-based firewall and streamline its internal infrastructure.

The open philosophy has allowed ASU to create an extensive online education program.

“One of president [Michael] Crow’s key goals was to extend higher education to all of Arizona,” Jay Etchings, director of operations, research computing/HPC for ASU, told theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media production team, during Open Daylight Summit. “To do that we have to be able to extend research computing to all of Arizona. As a publicly funded university, we have to do a fair share of that on our own. So the open methodology allows us to inter-operate with different universities without the high price of licensing, etc. Everything we can do open, we do, and we try to build a supported model around it to put it into production.”

An open flow-based firewall

ASU also built an open flow-based firewall for host protection. “The current initiative is around distributing that firewall so all the devices in that flow path can understand when a state change occurs or when there is a direct violation,” Etchings said.

A large student body means a large number of devices. ASU keeps the security of those devices in mind. “With a funding goal of $700 million by 2020, and being a top research university, we’re measured by who we include,” said Etchings. “Everybody brings their three devices. What my team has been trying to do is establish ways to allow them to operate with all these environments in a safe way. That challenge opens up a lot of new doors.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Open Daylight Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE