University of Naples Federico II: Huawei WDM Solution Helps University Digitalization

Background

Founded in 1224, University of Naples Federico II (hereafter Federico II), is one of the oldest universities in the world and a leading academic institution in Italy. Located in Naples, it offers a wide range of programs in various fields, including humanities, sciences, engineering, and medicine. With a strong focus on research and innovation, the university plays a pivotal role in the development of both local and global knowledge. The university consists of 26 departments, with more than 3,000 academic staff, over 4,500 administrative staff and around 100,000 students enrolled. Its rich history and commitment to excellence make it a prominent center for higher education in Europe.

Challenge

Over the course of years, Federico II is experiencing a digitalization evolution. An increasing data is generated from research, academic affairs, and university administration. Among all, the data exchange between campuses and with Italy national education backbone network are the booster of service volume. In order to be prepared for the “Data Explosion” in the upcoming 5-10 years, Federico II’s IT responsible team, known as C.S.I, decided to modernize the transmission WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) infrastructure.

During the infrastructure retreading, the previous WDM solution came into focus as well: The original solution was more than 5 years old and occupied lots of spaces. It’s not embedded with cutting-edge features and is unable to upgrade bandwidth due to End of Support (EoS) issue. More importantly, 10G bandwidth is insufficient to support further expansion for research and academic affairs data, like online video streaming. “We are eager to have a modernized WDM network that is flexible, reliable, and scalable to support expected traffic growth in the long-term”. Says Carmine Piccolo, technical director of metropolitan networks at Federico II.

Solution

Since 2022, Federico II has the great demand to provide a better network connection between campus and support massive data exchange with Italy national education backbone. “For this purpose, we planned to have 3 phases to implement WDM network revamping while guarantee the reliability for university staff during the modernization process,” recalls Carmine Piccolo. In Phase 1, Federico II’s aim is to build a new WDM ring and migrate legacy network’s 10GE services to achieve the service exchange inside the WDM ring and outside with other educational networks. During Phase 2, a new site was included in the ring and all the 10GE services were upgraded to 100GE client services. To better match the future growing trend, the bandwidth capacity is planned to upgrade to 400Gbps per wavelength in phase 3. Now Federico II is equipped with 200Gbps and is ready for 400Gbps bandwidth per wavelength.

Huawei proposed immediately the OptiXtrans E6600 WDM system and migration solution. Carmine Piccolo and his team are very satisfied with the high-end solution and migration service. After further analysis of costs, benefits, and functionalities, it quickly became clear that Huawei’s WDM solution is suitable to lay the foundation for the future of Federico II’s network.

WDM is short for "Wavelength Division Multiplexing". It is a technology that multiplexes different light wavelengths into a single pair of fiber to transmit different formats of services, such as Ethernet, SAN (Storage Area Network), SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy), Video, etc., over the same pair of fiber. Huawei’s OptiXtrans E6616 and E6608T were chosen for this project. They are suitable mainly for metro-level transmission scenario, from small to huge bandwidth, short to long distances.

Benefits

When building the new infrastructure, Huawei immediately helped Federico II with high performance WDM solution in late 2022. “Huawei OptiXtrans E6600 solution delivered a huge performance boost, both in transmission capability and daily O&M,” says Carmine Piccolo. With OTN architecture, campus services can add/drop at each site in great flexibility while maximize the usage of wavelength. This feature guarantees both small services like 10GE and large 100GE services to share the same 200G lambda. Furthermore, hard-pipe private line feature can not only help to eliminate the interference between service transmission but also classify and manage service by data type, like: research, academic affairs, administration, etc.

In addition to the OTN and hard-pipe isolation, it was crucial for IT team to operate and manage WDM network in an intelligent and efficient way. Previously in the legacy network, when there is a fiber fault issue, normally it will take IT team 3 hours to contact carriers to identify where is the fault, and carriers need another 3 hours to go onsite and fix it. “We are really satisfied about Huawei’s built-in ‘Fiber Doctor’ feature, which is integrated inside hardware,” says Carmine Piccolo. He pointed out that with Huawei’s new solution, his team can check the fault location on GIS map and tell carriers where is the fault location directly (with accuracy of ±3m). The problem-solving process reduces from 6 hours to 3 hours.

“Thanks to Huawei, the new WDM solution supports our digitalization evolution in a smooth way”, says Carmine Piccolo. From service migration to topology reconstruction, Huawei service team helped customer to minimize the service down time and guaranteed the reliable transmission after migration process. In addition, Huawei’s WDM solution is upgradable to 400G bandwidth per lambda without changing any photonic layer configuration to cope with future large computing of research data.

More about University of Naples Federico II

The University of Naples Federico II was founded by the king of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II on 5 June 1224. It is the world's oldest state-supported institution of higher education and research. In addition, Federico II was Europe's first university dedicated to training secular administrative staff, and is one of the world's oldest academic institutions in continuous operation.