The Swinburne University of Technology is no stranger to Cisco products. The house of tech education has been using Cisco's IP phones for years, and now it is working with Logicalis (News - Alert), an IT solutions and managed services provider based in New York, to upgrade and expand its on-campus IP network.

According the Swinburne website, Logicalis will install 3,800 IP phones and about 300 Cisco (News - Alert) switches that will service approximately 3,700 staff members and 35,000 students within the university. Previously, Swinburne used Cisco 7960 IP phones, and during this install it will upgrade to the Cisco 8945 model of video IP phones. The new models will work with Cisco 3850 switches.

This is not the first time that Logicalis has worked with the university. It provided a major network upgrade eight years ago and continues to provide monitoring and IT services as part of their continuing relationship.

Swinburne's associate director of infrastructure, ITS, Daniel Buttigieg, said this latest network refresh will touch and revamp 60 percent of the university's overall network. This will include the network core, its data centers, and edge switches. In addition to the video phone and switch installations, Logicalis will also install the Cisco Identity Services Engine and Citrix NetScaler.

The Cisco website describes its Identity Services Engine as a security policy management and control platform. It allows IT admins to control network access and provide security complaince for the entire network. The newest version of ISE, version 1.2, can integrate with a range of mobile device management and mobile application management technologies and can scale to support as many as 250,000 active and 1,000,000 registered devices.

The Citrix NetScaler application delivery controller allows admins to deal with network applications and mobile applications in the cloud. It provides load balancing to distribute workload across multiple servers so no single server becomes overworked. Applications will get performance where and when they need it, and available resources will distribute fairly and efficiently.