Case Study: Olivet Nazarene University achieves scalable, secure campus-wide Wi‑Fi with HPE Aruba Networking

Olivet Nazarene University Scales, Secures Massive Wireless Environment with Aruba

Olivet Nazarene University, a private Christian liberal arts university in Bourbonnais, Illinois, faced a growing WLAN problem as it rolled out Wi‑Fi across 30+ major buildings on a 225‑acre campus. First‑generation “fat” access points proved hard to manage, didn’t scale, and couldn’t securely handle the large number of personally owned student and guest devices, so IT needed centralized management, seamless roaming, strong authentication, and support for VoIP/PoE without massive per‑AP administration.

ONU deployed Aruba’s next‑generation mobility platform: an Aruba 800 master controller with multiple Aruba 5000 local controllers (plus backup), and over 400 Aruba AP‑52 thin APs running ArubaOS. The solution provided a Layer‑2 overlay, VRRP redundancy, centralized RF management and WIPS, 802.1X and captive‑portal authentication with RADIUS and dynamic keys, and auto RF calibration. The result was a campus‑wide, secure and scalable Wi‑Fi overlay that simplified deployment and management, lowered ownership costs, supported diverse client devices and VoIP, and delivered reliable coverage and performance for students, staff and guests.

Olivet Nazarene University

Dennis Seymour

Director of Computer Services