Brocade today announced that Mazenod College has become one of the first high schools in Australia to embrace 'New IP' networking as part of a campus LAN upgrade.
The Brocade networking solution has enabled the school to guarantee that each of its 850 students have access up to 100 Mbps of bandwidth on the network at all times. It also allows the school to maximise the use of locally hosted high-definition video, multimedia, and other content utilised in enhanced teaching and learning activities.
"Brocade offered us a great solution in terms of technology, price, and support that integrates well with the rest of our infrastructure,” said Hugo van Niekerk, ICT Director of Mazenod College. “It has enabled us to establish an advanced campus ‘nervous system’ that has already delivered tremendous improvements and created the foundation for us to provide some exciting innovations.”
Founded in 1966, Mazenod College is a Catholic secondary college for boys in years seven to 12 (roughly from age 11 to 16), located in Western Australia. Last year, Mazenod College bumped up against the limitations of its existing network infrastructure. Its legacy wired and wireless campus network could no longer cope with growing demand from laptops, tablets, and interactive data projectors for access to multimedia assets, which were stored on central IP storage area network (SAN) and networked attached storage (NAS) arrays. This slowed down the students in all 45 classrooms who had to wait to access their work folders at the start of each lesson.
“Fast wired and wireless network access is an absolute must for us to deliver a high-quality computing experience for every department, as well as for all students, teachers, and parents,” said van Niekerk. “We also required a smart, agile network that could support changes on the fly, such as a last-minute classroom shift, with the technology automatically ‘moving’ with the teacher.”
With the new Brocade network in place, students now receive Microsoft OneNote class updates from teachers in their work folders in 20 seconds—against up to 15 minutes in the past. Leveraging the greatly increased network capacity, Mazenod College is currently testing a system based on Microsoft SharePoint that will enable each lesson to be captured in real time, allowing students to replay classes in high definition, on demand. The school has also been able to implement a strong disaster recovery solution for the first time, with a 100 terabyte storage array housed in a concrete bunker.
“We supported Mazenod College through a very successful proof-of-concept test prior to the deployment of our solution, in time for the start of the school year,” said Adam Judd, VP for Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) at Brocade. “Schools want networks that simply work and meet their needs without a lot of administrative effort. The new Mazenod campus network is a great example of just how simple this can be. With built-in intelligence to automate what were previously manual tasks, teachers can now save time and put more focus on their students.”
Brocade ICX 7250 campus network switches have been deployed throughout Mazenod College, providing 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports for wired devices with each of the school’s new Fortinet 802.11ac wireless access points. These are connected via dual 1 GbE ports combined into a 2 Gbps link aggregation group. The campus network core is provided by Brocade VDX 6740 data centre switches. Brocade VCS Fabric technology creates a self-forming, self-healing Ethernet fabric with 10 GbE optical links to the school’s servers and the campus access switches. The Brocade VDX 6740 switches in the VCS fabric support Network File System (NFS) and iSCSI storage systems.
In addition, Mazenod College is using Brocade Network Advisor with Brocade’s networking best-practices built in. This provides a single point of insight and control over the school’s campus network operation. The entire Brocade infrastructure is covered under a five-year, 24x7 maintenance contract to help ensure that the school’s network delivers optimal performance.
The Brocade networking solution has enabled the school to guarantee that each of its 850 students have access up to 100 Mbps of bandwidth on the network at all times. It also allows the school to maximise the use of locally hosted high-definition video, multimedia, and other content utilised in enhanced teaching and learning activities.
"Brocade offered us a great solution in terms of technology, price, and support that integrates well with the rest of our infrastructure,” said Hugo van Niekerk, ICT Director of Mazenod College. “It has enabled us to establish an advanced campus ‘nervous system’ that has already delivered tremendous improvements and created the foundation for us to provide some exciting innovations.”
Founded in 1966, Mazenod College is a Catholic secondary college for boys in years seven to 12 (roughly from age 11 to 16), located in Western Australia. Last year, Mazenod College bumped up against the limitations of its existing network infrastructure. Its legacy wired and wireless campus network could no longer cope with growing demand from laptops, tablets, and interactive data projectors for access to multimedia assets, which were stored on central IP storage area network (SAN) and networked attached storage (NAS) arrays. This slowed down the students in all 45 classrooms who had to wait to access their work folders at the start of each lesson.
“Fast wired and wireless network access is an absolute must for us to deliver a high-quality computing experience for every department, as well as for all students, teachers, and parents,” said van Niekerk. “We also required a smart, agile network that could support changes on the fly, such as a last-minute classroom shift, with the technology automatically ‘moving’ with the teacher.”
With the new Brocade network in place, students now receive Microsoft OneNote class updates from teachers in their work folders in 20 seconds—against up to 15 minutes in the past. Leveraging the greatly increased network capacity, Mazenod College is currently testing a system based on Microsoft SharePoint that will enable each lesson to be captured in real time, allowing students to replay classes in high definition, on demand. The school has also been able to implement a strong disaster recovery solution for the first time, with a 100 terabyte storage array housed in a concrete bunker.
“We supported Mazenod College through a very successful proof-of-concept test prior to the deployment of our solution, in time for the start of the school year,” said Adam Judd, VP for Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) at Brocade. “Schools want networks that simply work and meet their needs without a lot of administrative effort. The new Mazenod campus network is a great example of just how simple this can be. With built-in intelligence to automate what were previously manual tasks, teachers can now save time and put more focus on their students.”
Brocade ICX 7250 campus network switches have been deployed throughout Mazenod College, providing 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports for wired devices with each of the school’s new Fortinet 802.11ac wireless access points. These are connected via dual 1 GbE ports combined into a 2 Gbps link aggregation group. The campus network core is provided by Brocade VDX 6740 data centre switches. Brocade VCS Fabric technology creates a self-forming, self-healing Ethernet fabric with 10 GbE optical links to the school’s servers and the campus access switches. The Brocade VDX 6740 switches in the VCS fabric support Network File System (NFS) and iSCSI storage systems.
In addition, Mazenod College is using Brocade Network Advisor with Brocade’s networking best-practices built in. This provides a single point of insight and control over the school’s campus network operation. The entire Brocade infrastructure is covered under a five-year, 24x7 maintenance contract to help ensure that the school’s network delivers optimal performance.
posted from Bloggeroid
No comments:
Post a Comment