Xiamen University Malaysia Builds a Better and Smarter Campus

About the Xiamen University Malaysia Campus

Xiamen University Malaysia, located in Sepang, Selangor, is the first overseas campus opened by a major Chinese university. The university offers a huge range of full-time undergraduate and graduate courses in literature, business, science, engineering, and medicine and, to date, has enrolled over 5000 students.

After years of construction and development, the campus covers 150 acres, with a floor area of 470,000 square meters, magnificent architecture, and a full range of facilities.

Key Business Challenges

In terms of ICT construction and Operations and Maintenance (O&M), the campus had high requirements for network capacity, indoor wireless coverage, and high-bandwidth access, with an additional need for an advanced data center.

In particular, with the new campus offering a range of information areas with a high density of people — from teachers’ and administrative offices, smart classrooms, multimedia rooms, and laboratories, to student dormitories, student unions, canteens, a library, theater halls, and sports venues — providing a high-speed and smooth network environment represented a significant challenge.

Nevertheless, the university maintained its focus on creating a stable and reliable information infrastructure that could provide first-class facilities for all teachers and students, allowing them to thrive in an outstanding educational environment.

To meet the university’s requirements, high-density deployment and Wi-Fi access for multiple users was critical. A high-speed network for campus offices and dormitories was necessary to support multiple key services, and provide high reliability and easy O&M.

Constructing a data center that could be quickly rolled out, deployed in stages, and easily managed — all while reducing energy consumption — was also a huge challenge during the construction of the campus infrastructure.

A Smarter Campus for Xiamen University Malaysia

• Smart Campus Solution for Education Institutions

High-speed network coverage has been provided, with speeds of 10 Gbit/s that can even reach 100 Gbit/s in the future, meeting the requirements of bandwidth-hungry tasks such as downloading videos and other large files.

The Wi-Fi solution helps provide customized network coverage to meet the requirements for various scenarios, such as in classrooms, auditoriums, meeting rooms, dormitories, and sports centers.

Powerful, fully-programmable switches help customers simultaneously deploy wired and wireless networks in a new campus network, unify user policies on the entire network, and ensure network security. The agile controller supports both fixed and mobile networks, guaranteeing a highly consistent service experience and providing user access, anytime, anywhere.

Solution advantages:

• AirEngine Wi-Fi6, powered by Huawei 5G technology, implements innovations such as smart antenna technology, three-radio frequencies, and distributed Wi-Fi as a basis. Whether the user is in a terminal-dense area or in a densely populated theater hall, high-quality free Wi-Fi access is available across on the campus.

• The CampusInsight solution uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovations — including fault mode analysis, fault prediction, and proactive prevention — to provide both teachers and students with an optimal Wi-Fi experience, alongside highly efficient O&M.

• S57/S127 series switches implement high performance architecture, including Gigabit Ethernet (GE) access, 10G aggregation, and a 100G core, providing access for a multitude of users and large-capacity concurrency.

• CSS2/iStack/LAG ensures end-to-end reliability from the access, aggregation, and core layers, providing the university with a highly reliable network architecture.

• A wired and wireless convergence solution implements unified authentication for wired and wireless users, with Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) delivering zero configuration services, and AC3.0 providing unified management of network and security policies.

• The Huawei Wi-Fi and IoT solution constructs a smart campus network with everything-sensing and big data capabilities, implementing fast deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) through Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID)/ZigBee/Bluetooth module convergence.

• Smart Modular Data Center

Huawei’s modular data center solution adopts a modular architecture and is prefabricated and pre-commissioned in the factory. Compared with traditional data centers, this innovative solution reduces deployment time by 50%. In addition, it provides on-demand deployment and flexible capacity expansion, with support for service requirements in cloud computing, facilitating the rapid development of the campus. In-room down-flow air-conditioning incorporates a cold aisle containment design to improve cooling efficiency, reducing electricity costs. In addition, a highly efficient modular Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) and fully redundant 2N design ensure highly reliable power supply.

The NetEco intelligent management system facilitates unified management of the equipment room environment, with intelligent management also simplifying O&M and making it more efficient.

Various applications on campus, 24/7 virtual labs, and high-performance computing services all run stably and quickly from this powerful modular data center, meeting the current and future education and research requirements of both teachers and students.

All-in-one card applications and a centralized control management system of all classrooms rely on the data network and data center. Now, teachers simply insert an all-in-one card into a single slot to turn on all the devices in a classroom. When a fault occurs, IT personnel can remotely check the status of the devices in the classroom, make calls, and quickly resolve the problem.

The all-in-one card service has also increased convenience for teachers and students in terms of providing identification for access to various facilities and allowing quicker, easier transactions when buying goods on campus.

Graduation

In September 2019, the university celebrated its first group of graduates. There are sure to be many more as increasing numbers of students arrive not only from Asia, but from all over the world, to study at this first-class university. Huawei will continue to work closely with Xiamen University to innovate technology and launch further smart, safe, and green campus solutions, products, and services, to build a top-tier information infrastructure.