Creating a Better Student Experience
Reading Area Community College (RACC) is an accredited, comprehensive, open-enrollment educational institution that provides the following: Associate degree, Certificate and Diploma Programs; career-focused training; transitional coursework; skills training for business and industry; personal enrichment programs and public service activities. Sponsored by Berks County, the College provides affordable access to meet identified community educational needs. The school has about 4200 students.
Challenges
Internet outages were becoming increasingly problematic. This led RACC to evaluate their current internet architecture and engage Weidenhammer as their partner. The objective was to design a reliable, redundant internet platform which ensures high availability and minimal disruption to students, faculty, staff and classes.
25%
Percentage of online courses at RACC.
Solutions
Working with RACC Weidenhammer was able to provide a
solution that included:
- Replacing the existing ASA 5525 firewall with Cisco 2130 next generation firewalls deployed in a single, high availability pair
- Implementing Cisco’s Firepower security solution on the new firewalls
- Deploying Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous systems on the internet
- Increasing the availability of their internet service—a key benefit for students who can now reach student online resources
Results
Since a new internet solution has been developed and
parameters defined, the results show
- RACC now has a high availability internet
solution designed to fit their needs
- Redundant firewalls and system configuration
allowing for primary and secondary internet providers with failover
- Automatic funneling—when one service provider goes
down, internet traffic is automatically funneled to the alternate service
provider allowing for seamless productivity and connectivity
- Uptime is increased for students, faculty and
staff
“…it was a pleasure working with Weidenhammer on the design and implementation of this solution. I have always found Weidenhammer’s engineers able to understand our challenges, design a solution to meet our needs and deliver on the implementation…”
Anderson Forrest, CIO
