Mazenod College, one of the high schools in Australia, has made investments in Brocade’s IP networking for upgrading campus LAN.
The Brocade networking solution has enabled the school to offer up to 100 Mbps of bandwidth on the network to its 850 students.
The networking solution from Brocade also allows the school to maximize the use of HD video, multimedia, and other content utilized in enhanced teaching and learning activities.
Its legacy wired and wireless campus network could not handle growing demand from laptops, tablets. The interactive data projectors were stored on central IP SAN and NAS arrays slowed down the students in all 45 classrooms using their work folders and access materials at the start of each lesson.
Hugo van Niekerk, ICT director of Mazenod College, said: “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.”
Brocade network support students to receive Microsoft OneNote class updates from teachers in their work folders in 20 seconds. Mazenod College is testing a system based on Microsoft SharePoint to capture each lesson in real time, allowing students to replay classes in high definition, on demand.
The college has also implemented a disaster recovery solution for the first time, with a 100 terabyte storage array housed in a concrete bunker.
The college deployed Brocade ICX 7250 campus network switches, 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.
Adam Judd, vice president for Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) at Brocade, said: “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.”
Mazenod College is also using Brocade Network Advisor, an application – providing a single point of insight and control over the school’s campus network operation. The college has signed a five-year, 24×7 maintenance contract to cover the entire Brocade infrastructure.
