Simplifying the IT merger of its entities with DDI

Project objectives

Key benefits

With almost 60,000 students, University of Grenoble Alpes is one of the main centres of higher education in France. The institution, which is spread over more than 200 buildings and hosts in addition to students, 3,000 research professors and 3,700 collaborators, was created with the merger of the Universities of Grenoble (1, 2 and 3), the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble and the Institut d’études politiques de Grenoble in 2016.

Before EfficientIP, we had teams that managed their addressing plans, DNS and VLANs with spreadsheets. Today, we have complete visibility and control over the entire DDI infrastructure.
Gilles Bruno, DNS Administrator

Situation and Challenges Being Faced

In order to improve simplicity, visibility and efficiency for all entities, as well as improve the governance of the information system, the question arose of unifying and centralising the management of the DDI (DNS, DHCP, IPAM). Following the merger of its various entities with the creation of a central IT department, the University of Grenoble needed to create a platform capable of centralising and managing all its addressing plans, while ensuring the delegation of rights so that the various users could also manage their addressing parameters.

Solution Implemented

The EfficientIP solution was chosen over the Infoblox solution for its flexibility, ease of use and more advanced and granular delegation tools. The University of Grenoble then migrated its whole DDI infrastructure to the SOLIDserver solution. This first step has already made it possible to rationalise the number of servers needed to manage it. There are now 4 servers, which reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the solution by over 40%.

The integrated DDI automation and flexibility provided by EfficientIP also allows us to be more efficient in managing our DDI, while ensuring the maximum performance and availability of related services for users.
Gilles Bruno, DNS Administrator

Main Results

Thanks to EfficientIP’s delegation capabilities, the University of Grenoble provides each of its entities with a high level of autonomy in managing their IP addresses and DNS zones while maintaining a single data repository. «Before making the switch, we had teams that managed their addressing plans and VLANs with spreadsheets. Today, we have complete visibility and control over the entire DDI infrastructure,» explains Gilles Bruno, DNS Administrator at the University of Grenoble. «The integrated DDI automation and flexibility provided by EfficientIP also allows us to be more efficient in managing our DDI, while ensuring the maximum performance and availability of related services for users. We now also have a very high level of consistency between the inventory and the actual state of the infrastructure. Finally, this unification has considerably reduced the number of errors made during the configuration phases by over 30%.”

Conclusions / Future Plans

The University of Grenoble will rely on its DDI solution to support the growth of IoT within its organisation.This evolution will be accompanied by an increase in IPv6 within the University.

«Today, we have a stable, high-performance infrastructure that is more than capable of supporting the university’s growth. We can also count on EfficientIP’s «Professional Services» department to support us in all our new needs»,
concludes Gilles Bruno.