Aruba Instant On boosts YMCA of Greater Boston’s networking across 24 locations
Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that YMCA of Greater Boston has modernised its networking infrastructure with the Aruba Instant On small- and medium-sized business (SMB) portfolio. This enables organisation to support a growing number of internet of things (IoT) devices and other connected applications, while providing facility-wide connectivity for its members and visitors. The deployment is also reducing network management costs by 50%.
Established in 1851 as America’s Y and dedicated to improving the health of mind, body, and spirit of individuals and families, YMCA of Greater Boston has deployed the Aruba Instant On high-performance, cloud-managed small business wired and wireless networking solution. As one of the private social services providers in Massachusetts, with an annual operations budget of over $84 million (€77.17 million), YMCA of Greater Boston is utilising its new network across 24 locations to digitise operations and provide guest Wi-Fi to more than 70,000 members and a total of nearly 2 million annual visits by members, programme participants, visitors, and business partners.
Whether it’s enabling the distribution of over one million youth meals annually, offering fitness activities, conducting adult job training, or providing transitional housing solutions, modern nonprofit organisations like YMCA of Greater Boston require secure, flexible networking infrastructure that is managed to support a growing amount of mobile, IoT, and immersive applications.
“Given our expansive mission to innovate services that drive stability, health, wellness, learning, connection, and opportunity for all in our communities, it’s imperative that we have seamless and always-on connectivity to empower our employees, collaborate with our partners, and provide members and visitors with exceptional user experiences,” says Philip DeFeo, IT manager at the YMCA of Greater Boston. “As a philanthropy and government-funded non-profit organisation, it’s also critical to maximise our resources by adopting reliable and cost-effective technology solutions, including wired and wireless networking infrastructure.”
After evaluating small business networking solutions in collaboration with partner CDW, YMCA of Greater Boston selected Aruba Instant On Wi-Fi 6 AP22 Access Points (APs) and Aruba Instant On Smart-Managed 1930 Switch Series as its future-proof infrastructure. The solutions enable the YMCA to support the skyrocketing number of employee, guest, and operational devices at its facilities, including IoT-enabled technologies such as digital signage, TVs, exercise equipment, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) sensors, and security systems.
By providing the YMCA of Greater Boston with Gigabit networking speeds, Aruba Instant On supports the organisation’s cloud-enabled workforce with bandwidth-heavy applications like streaming video for educational, wellness, and other programming, as well as web conferencing and cloud-delivered SaaS (software as a service) applications for operational interactions.
Further, the Aruba Instant On offering helps generate IT resource efficiencies due to its advanced cloud-based management dashboard, accessed via the Aruba Instant On Mobile App or web browser, which streamlines network configuration and administration tasks.
“Compared with the other vendors we evaluated, the management capabilities of the Aruba Instant On solution are significantly more advanced, streamlined, and intuitive. Most importantly, replacing our legacy solution with Aruba Instant On has reduced the amount of time required for configuration and management tasks by about 50%,” says DeFeo.
With its Wi-Fi network fully deployed, YMCA of Greater Boston has turned to its wired network and is implementing new, Aruba Instant On smart-managed switches to create a unified, secure wired and wireless network. This will lead to evaluating options for retiring some existing legacy firewalls, particularly at smaller Wi-Fi-only childcare and camp locations, to reduce the organisation’s physical infrastructure footprint and help meet sustainability objectives.
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