As part of theCube’s continued coverage of the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas today, Wikibon founder Dave Vellante met with two practitioners from HP customer, Sao Paulo State University in Brazil. Represented by network analyst Jessian Cavalcanti and network manager Carlos Coletti, this is the university’s second year attending the conference.

The Sao Paulo State University network supports about 60,000 users; among these users are roughly 45,000 students and 10,000 faculty members. Each faculty member has their own VoIP device connected to the network, equaling 10,000 managed VoIP endpoints. The campus, and therefore its network, is connected across 23 cities, supported by five regional nodes, with the main node located in the capital of the state. The network consists of two rings and a total of 40 WAN nodes.

The team manages over 300 physical servers, 60 percent of which are virtualized using VMware; a project that the university began in 2008. Cavalcanti and Coletti have been managing the project in phases, beginning with small servers that hosted non-critical websites, and later moving to more critical systems such as email and the main university portal. Some systems, such as the university’s ERP systems, remain physical only. This is a result of the common concerns of jeopardizing performance while maintaining security in the virtualization process.

The university is a huge proponent of the bring your own device (BYOD) movement, namely because the students are expecting this model to work, forcing the network to be available to them from their own devices. “Today, in our labs, half of the students only use the table to place their own mobile notebooks, not even using the lab desktop systems,” said Cavalcanti. “We expect full-blown use of students’ own devices within one or two years and all of the lab desktops will be cleared away.”

The university is also ahead of the IPv6 curve having implemented the protocol throughout most of its network, including the university websites, email systems, DNS servers, many of the workstations, and even part of the wireless network. “It is a nice experience working with this new protocol – it all seems to be running very well,” said Cavalcanti.

Sao Paulo University is pleased with HP as a strategic partner. Coming from a mix of vendors supporting its infrastructure, beginning in 2007, the university began to consolidate its vendors, deploying new equipment and systems using completely HP gear. “We began the vendor consolidation process, which was driven by our wireless network already working on HP equipment, to standardize on HP gear because we find using a single vendor easier for deployment, training, and operation as we gain a unified interface for management across both wired/wireless networks,” said Coletti. “Of course, because we are a public school, we must look for the most competitive price. HP was also the most competitive, so HP has won.”