Case Study: University of Texas at San Antonio achieves choice, simplicity and reduced OPEX with Cumulus Networks (Cumulus Linux)

University of Texas at San Antonio Leverages Cumulus® Linux® for Choice and Simplicity

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), a large research university and home to North America’s first Open Compute Project (OCP) Certification and Solution Laboratory, faced limited reuse of networking assets, tight research budgets, and time‑consuming vendor‑specific operations. Vertically integrated stacks forced hardware‑locked choices and manual workflows that slowed deployments and increased operational burden for a small IT staff.

UTSA adopted an open networking model using OCP switches with ONIE and Cumulus Linux, plus Ansible automation, enabling hardware/software choice, floating licenses and server‑like management of switches. The new approach put two‑thirds of the network on OCP, cut hardware replacement and provisioning to 10–15 minutes (worst case 1 hour), delivered a 4–8x operational improvement, and reduced CAPEX and OPEX while accelerating networking education and research agility.

University of Texas at San Antonio

Carlos Cardenas

Associate Director, Applied Research in Cloud Computing, University of Texas at San Antonio