Ringwood Secondary College is a public secondary college in the outer Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne. It employs approximately 160 teachers and administrators, and teaches approximately 1,500 year 7-12 students per year. It also incorporates Ringwood Training, which provides automotive, engineering and IT training to approximately 350 senior students, trainees and apprentices per year.
Historically, the school’s network needed only to provide storage, data transfer and internet access to support its staff and students. And for 17 years, it used a traditional server and storage model to do that, before eventually transitioning to a SAN model for 5 years, before HyperFlex.
But in 2007 the school began implementing a 1-to-1 learning environment, and by 2011 all students had a mobile device. At this time, Ringwood’s principal, Michael Phillips, saw an opportunity to further improve the school’s teaching and learning infrastructure by fully leveraging digital technologies for class and homework.
He planned to issue all year 7 and 8 students with an Apple iPad, and all year 9, 10 and 11 students with an Apple MacBook. Each device needed to be connected to the school’s network and configured to provide secure access to the student’s personal storage space, enabling storage of all schoolrelated files (including very large video and streaming media files from the Media Arts and Digital Technologies programs) on the school’s own servers.
In addition, students enrolled in Ringwood Training courses added another 350+ connected devices to the mix, many of which were being used by students completing an Advanced Diploma in Information Technology, which integrates Cisco Networking Academy courses (CCNA/Security) and has particularly demanding IT requirements.
And finally, the school’s 160 teaching and administration staff each use two to three connected devices, and the school’s various parent and community committees and programs also connect to the network and save files.
This meant the school’s network needed to evolve from one that supported only 1,600 users and 250 connected devices, to one that supported more than 5,000 users and more than 2,200 connected devices! From just ~2TB of data stored per day to ~50TB, and from 10GB downloaded per day to ~650GB - most of it wirelessly.
In other words, Phillips needed to transform the school’s network into one with the capacity to support the scope of needs usually found in a Fortune 500 company!
Naturally, that meant enterprise-grade reliability, uptime and privacy, and because public education IT budgets rarely match those of the corporate sector, it also meant flexibility, including the ability to expand with growing organisational needs without necessitating a technical re-design.
Just as importantly, Phillips also wanted to integrate a single solution, rather than having to construct, design and deploy many individual components to comprise a solution.
“We also wanted a single hardware maintenance agreement across the entire solution,” he said. “From server to storage to data centre switching, we wanted just one contract and just one point of contact. An end to end solution.”
“And although our needs match those of a big corporate, our budget certainly doesn’t,” said Phillips. “We had a fraction of the typical private sector budge taround $130k to dedicate to the project, and it had to cover server and storage hardware under a three-year lease, with a five-year lifecycle, along with all deployment and migration of our retired systems.”
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