Notre Dame Replaces 955 Switches Across 170 Buildings in Five Months

According to a SiliconANGLE report, the university standardised its wired campus on Cisco Catalyst 9300X multigigabit switches managed through Cisco Catalyst Center with zero-touch provisioning. The agreement also covers Cisco Professional Services and Cisco ThousandEyes, used for visibility into both owned and third-party networks. The first building was cut over during spring break in March, and by Aug. 1 all but a handful of single-switch sites had been completed. SiliconANGLE described the work as an example of the infrastructure debt that has to be cleared before AI deployments can be supported, rather than an AI project itself.

John Buysse, Notre Dame's senior director of network and telephony services, said the outgoing equipment ranged from "a couple years old" to "probably 15-plus years old," spanning about 28 models and more than 100 operating system versions. All of it was Cisco gear, which he cited as a reminder that a single vendor does not mean standardisation.

Coordination was the difficult part. Notre Dame chief information officer Tracy Weber said ensuring that business in each building continued during cutovers required intense planning, and that the campus hotel, restaurants and athletics operations keep running even through the Christmas break. "This place never shuts down," she said.

Bandwidth demand continued to rise throughout the project. Buysse said campus usage more than doubled between fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2026, driven largely by video. The target for 2030 is to support a 100-gigabit connection to an end user where it is needed rather than everywhere, and the network is planned around a 10-year lifecycle.

Weber said students set the bar for performance and that their expectations extend beyond personal devices: the washers and dryers in residence halls have to connect to an app that tells them how many minutes are left. She recalled a student tour guide pointing out the IT building and saying, "That's the IT center. They pretty much just run the network." Her measure of success is the absence of complaints in The Observer, the student newspaper, which she said does report when users are unhappy.

The refresh meant abandoning an annual upgrade cycle. Buysse said the previous approach of yearly upgrades produced a wide variety of hardware and consumed a tremendous amount of staff time, so the team chose to upgrade the whole campus at once and use the off years for other strategic goals. Inconsistent performance was the visible cost of the old approach, with service tickets routinely describing a function that worked in one building and failed in another. The goal now, he said, is that users have a consistent experience regardless of which building they are in.

Wi-Fi upgrades drove part of the switch work. As the campus moved to 6-gigahertz-capable wireless, it needed more back-end bandwidth, and multigigabit switching improved the wireless experience while also helping users who need wired connections. Power was the other constraint: Buysse said switches were heavily underutilised because they could not be fully populated without exceeding the Power over Ethernet budget, with cameras and phones competing with access points for that capacity. The report advised IT leaders planning Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 deployments to budget for switch refreshes and PoE headroom at the same time rather than as a follow-on.

Consistency also functions as a security control. Buysse said a network running more than 100 operating system versions cannot be patched at attack speed. Notre Dame now runs three golden images in Catalyst Center, with what he described as constant auditing to show that all switches are configured in line with those images, giving the team a known security baseline.