Case Study: University of Texas at San Antonio achieves resilient, high-performance multi-campus network with Brocade

University of Texas at San Antonio - Customer Case Study

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), a growing Tier One research university serving roughly 30,000 students across three campuses and supporting 25 research centers, was hampered by an aging, hub-and-spoke network. Changing traffic patterns, cross‑campus Layer 2 requirements for labs and applications, and equipment nearing end-of-life left the IT team unable to deliver the flexible, highly available, and secure services demanded by faculty, students, and researchers.

UTSA replaced its core with 26 Brocade MLX routers and a MPLS/VPLS mesh architecture, collapsing core and border routing to create a private enterprise cloud. The deployment enabled rapid virtual network provisioning, granular traffic engineering, and dynamic resiliency (including failover for fiber cuts); reboot times dropped from 10–12 minutes to under three. The result was higher performance, improved uptime across campuses, greater service flexibility, and strong vendor support and VPLS expertise.

University of Texas at San Antonio

Keith Trevino

Senior Enterprise Network Engineer