Parade College in Melbourne, Australia has improved the connectivity and traffic load capability of its campus network. IP telephony will be among the new additions in the upgraded system.
The catholic secondary school, which has two campuses based in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, has been forced to deal with accommodating an increased number of students as well as a rising demand for improved connectivity and a tablet-based computer environment which never switches off.
The school has made the decision to implement a network to allow for better management of 24/7 traffic loads. Brocade are partnering on the project.
The current network supports IP telephony, 180 CCTV cameras, IP, 140 wireless access points and 1,200 desktop PCs.
Talking about the imminent upgrades, Parade College IT manager Daniel Caporetto said:
“We’re going to be expanding from 1,800 to 2,200 students in the next few years and are also planning to equip all our students with tablet devices, which is certainly going to drive network traffic higher.”
He feels that the old infrastructure was past its sell-by-date and comprised various vendors, which only resulted in management problems. Caporetto continued:
“There was no redundancy in the system and the amount of throughput it could support was already over-subscribed. We therefore determined to deploy a new, single-vendor solution to support traffic growth, as well as improve reliability and manageability.”
The needs of the network were evaluated by Brocade, along with partner Mycom, before they designed a solution to integrate both campus networks as well as meet the requirements for students and staff. One key area that received some attention was the network core, relying on just one switch. It was named as a major potential failure point, in addition to presenting a risk of bottleneck issues.
