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Ricoh has wrapped up the rollout of Cisco networking infrastructure at Perth secondary school Servite College, as part of a project aimed at helping the school keep up with the rapid growth of mobile device usage by more than 1,000 students.
“We had reached the stage where our infrastructure was coming under strain due to the increasing demands being placed on it,” Servite College innovation and research director Trevor Galbraith said.
“We were experiencing performance issues that were affecting the usability of the infrastructure and the level of service we could provide to users,” he said.
The new network infrastructure, which went live at the beginning of the year after a four-week deployment during the school holiday break, involved the migration of the college’s existing wireless network environment to the Cisco Aironet platform, tapping into new Cisco access points and wireless LAN controllers.
The initial migration represented the first phase of the project, with the second phase focused on consolidating and replacing the school’s core and edge switching infrastructure. For this part of the project, Ricoh deployed Cisco Catalyst devices in the network core and Catalyst devices at the edge.
As part of the project, the school now uses Microsoft’s Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery to protect its data stores, meaning that students and teachers can still access their files should a failure occur within the on-campus infrastructure.
According to Galbraith, Ricoh continues to provide ongoing management and maintenance of the network infrastructure, reducing associated workload on staff.
“Ultimately, this translates to better student learning and job satisfaction for Servite staff,” he said.
Ricoh’s Servite College project helps to illustrate the rising partner opportunities present in the local education sector, a vertical that has been the focus of the likes of big integrators such as KPMG and vendors like Google alike.
As reported by ARN in February, Google continues to surpass Apple and Microsoft as the technology of choice in classrooms across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), cornering the local market through an expanding ecosystem of channel partners.
In 2016, meanwhile, KPMG's head of technology advisory, Richard Marrison, outlined how new digital delivery models are set to enable Australia’s largest tertiary institutions to capitalise on new business opportunities across the vertical – a trend made possible by enterprise IT and the partners that provide it.
“We are seeing some of the large Australian universities spend hundreds of millions of dollars on technology change,” Richard Marrison said at the time.
This could be part of the reason why one of Australia’s biggest homegrown integrators, Data#3, has been talking up its education sector prowess recently, completing Aruba networking rollouts for local education institutions, The Southport School and John Paul College.
The more recently announced of the two school projects, at Queensland’s The Southport School, saw Data#3 rollout a new network that is helping to boost the school's ability to manage more than 3,000 devices for more than 1,600 students across a 100-acre campus.
“From greater network coverage and improved security, to enhanced reporting capabilities and better BYOD control, we have a powerful platform upon which to deliver a seamless wireless experience, placing the school at the forefront of technology-driven teaching and learning,” The Southport School director of ICT Richard Humphreys said.
