Situated on two separate campuses in Western Australia, Bunbury Catholic College is a co-educational Catholic year 7-12 school aiming to keep education quality high while keeping overall fees low. As the original campus in Bunbury quickly grew to serve over 1000 students, Bunbury Catholic College opened a second campus, Mercy, in Australind. Today, there are 1400 students, 200 staff members, and a small team of 5 IT staff across the two campuses.
Greg Everitt is the man behind the scenes making technology and IT work in and out of the classrooms. Having started as a systems administrator over a decade ago and now serving as the IT Manager of both campuses, he’s seen everything from the nuts and bolts up to the overall network and systems strategy. On his lean team, only 2 staff actively look after the Cisco Meraki network they have in place – one at Bunbury and one at Mercy. The overall goal of Everitt’s team is to keep all students connected and “provide as good of service as we can with the budget that we’ve got.” When the IT team was tasked with pushing out a 1:1 laptop program, they knew they needed a stronger, more reliable network to support the large number of devices that would shortly come onboard.
Prior to Meraki, the Bunbury IT team was using a complex command line interface (CLI) to configure and maintain the network. Additionally, all of the time-consuming firmware updates had to be pushed out over the school holidays, as they couldn’t be scheduled, finished overnight, or completed over a weekend. They had minimal visibility with the previous network even though Everitt tried to integrate open source tools to get a better idea of what was happening on the network, but still “all the stats we now get from Meraki are so much better and easier.”
