Nebrija University is a private, secular and independent institution located in Madrid, Spain. Named after the 15th-century humanist who published the first grammar of the Spanish language, Nebrija University was founded 15 years ago to expand Spanish language and culture and promote understanding between people of many nations, while maintaining the highest quality of scientific investigation and academic instruction.

The University serves about 2,000 students on two campuses: the Dehesa de la Villa campus, located in downtown Madrid, which houses the Center for Hispanic Studies, business school, Higher Polytechnic School, School of Architecture and programs run by the postgraduate school. All other courses are housed on the La Berzosa campus, located in Hoyo de Manzanares, a Madrid suburb. In addition to classroom instruction, the University also offers distance training, for which Internet access is vital.

Defining the Problem

The network at Nebrija University supports 3,000 users, including students, residents, professors and staff. The University’s bandwidth requirements had increased markedly, principally due to the increase in Internet connections, video downloads and the online streaming of video presentations for both instructional and recreational purposes, as Internet service is provided at University residence halls.

The University’s network infrastructure was permanently running at 90 to 100 percent of capacity, which meant that during periods of heavy usage, the network was barely able to cope. The increased demands for bandwidth interrupted service and caused serious problems for network access.

Finding the Solution

Secure Internet access service was supported by a five-year-old Blue Coat ProxySG appliance, so first, the University’s IT technicians decided to renovate its Internet network access gateway. This entailed upgrading the existing Blue Coat ProxySG appliance and optimizing the 100 Mbps network to improve both the University’s Internet service and the internal host that maintains the University’s virtual campus.

The IT group upgraded to a Blue Coat ProxySG 900-10 appliance running the latest version of SGOS software (v6.2), and kept the older ProxySG appliances as back-ups. The University also installed a Blue Coat PacketShaper appliance to manage and optimize network bandwidth.

With the PacketShaper appliance, the University has a deeper visibility of all the applications and content running through its network. Because PacketShaper can control the performance and bandwidth consumption by application and web content category, University technicians can now prioritize educational traffic while containing the impact of less important Internet content.

This investment by Nebrija University has resolved the Internet problems it was experiencing and improved bandwidth management for both the Internet service and the virtual campus.

Seeing Results

Blue Coat Secure Web Gateway solution, together with the Blue Coat WAN optimization solution, enable the University to deliver applications, video and other internet content to all of the University’s users while reducing bandwidth consumption and improving the user experience. The ProxySG appliances cache on-demand web and video content and serve it to subsequent views without any additional bandwidth impact.

Live streaming video scales to a very large number of views without overloading the network because it requires only a single stream, which is locally divided to provide the service to all users.

As well as optimizing the University’s Internet gateway and accelerating the delivery of video, the Secure Web Gateway solution helps the University protect the personal information of its students, academic body and staff and prevent phishing, spyware and other malicious threats from accessing the system.

“The University is focusing on long-distance education and applications, which require a perfectly secure and optimized bandwidth to function correctly,” said Daniel Magaña Martínez, systems director at Nebrija University. “In this regard, we are all completely satisfied with the response and reliability of Blue Coat’s solutions, which have helped us not only to fix our problems by improving our bandwidth management, but also made it possible to meet future challenges with confidence.”