Managing a university or college’s IT infrastructure and fiber is no easy feat: with campus expansions, satellite locations, and an endless parade of new technologies placing demands on your fiber (Harvard has a wired forest, believe it or not — and University of Florida is piloting connected vehicle infrastructure).
We make netTerrain: IT documentation software built to make life easier for data center, network, and fiber/outside plant teams.
Fiber/outside plant documentation capabilities have not always been included in netTerrain — customers at a major university, who had purchased netTerrain for network documentation began asking if netTerrain could also help them document their campuses. netTerrain’s IT documentation gave them the information they needed to reduce their workload, expenses, and stress – and they liked netTerrain’s ease of use, scalability, and flexibility and they needed a way to document their fiber that didn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Over the years since we first rolled out netTerrain OSP, we’ve had numerous college/university teams select netTerrain for their fiber mapping software.
So…why do these teams choose fiber mapping software like netTerrain? How does it help them? Check out the key reasons why netTerrain helps university and college fiber teams:
1. Get Fast Answers
Colleges and universities typically have multiple buildings — and some have multiple sites. Spreadsheets or GoogleEarth don’t cut it for keeping tabs on where all of your fiber is across multiple buildings and locations. If, for example, you have a question about something — driving across campus, or even hours away to an auxiliary location (and then driving back), is a big hassle.
With software like netTerrain, you can avoid all that with clicks. As one of our customers (the University of Notre Dame) said: “in five minutes, we can get work done that used to take hours.”
2. Get Accurate Insights
Something is always happening in academia…and something always needs to be fixed! Do you need a better way to understand the full impact of an outage on your campus? Need to find where something’s located in seconds?
Fiber mapping software, such as netTerrain, is a giant step forward for your team. netTerrain, for example, spits out beautiful and detailed visual diagrams that depict your splice cases, manholes, where all of your fiber routes to, where it ends in a building, and more. Your diagrams are easy to access: you can keep them stored on the Cloud or on your own server.
Example: View manholes from your desktop
3. Plan Expansions
Universities are always undergoing some type of expansion. Need to understand how expansions will impact your fiber infrastructure — will you need to purchase more equipment and fiber? If so, in what quantities?
Solutions like netTerrain OSP make it simple to figure out what you have and what you’ll need when you’re planning expansions.
Example: Plan fiber capacity in clicks
4. Reduce Expenses
Proper fiber documentation helps you save on two of your organization’s most valuable assets: time and money. Fiber routing and connectivity reports in netTerrain helps our customers fix issues far faster. Make sure you have the availability your campus needs — without going over budget. Reduce onboarding time for new employees by giving them detailed documentation that helps them hit the ground running.
netTerrain (for networks, data centers, and fiber plants) has helped our university and college customers untangle their fiber spaghetti, save time, save money, and reduce headaches.
To learn more about how netTerran’s helped colleges like yours, check out the following case studies:
- Fiber:
University of Notre Dame - Data Centers:
Liberty University
- Networks:
University of Calgary