D-Link upgrades Qld school network

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 26 November 2009 07:21

IT Industry - Deals

Networking solutions provider, D-Link has completed a network and wireless infrastructure upgrade at Queensland’s independent Catholic college for boys, Iona College, including VOIP services throughout the college.

Iona College IT manager, Seamus Cooley, said the college was “looking to change from an ad-hoc wireless network to a managed wireless network in anticipation of student laptops requiring more coverage around the campus. We engaged D-Link and competitors to quote and advise on solutions. D-Link was the only networking vendor to offer a complimentary wireless site survey and so it was tasked with answering our key objectives.”

Cooley said that, in addition to requiring greater wireless coverage, Iona was having problems with its network switches and the maintenance contract was due for renewal, and  IT staff “could not manage the college's network on their own and relied completely on paying a third party for support. Therefore, D-Link clarified the school's requirements for the wireless network in general, as well as the switch and network management.”

Iona College's information systems infrastructure comprises of eight computer rooms, two server rooms and a network with subnets connecting 20 buildings, it hosts web sites for third-party Catholic institutions as well as complete IT solutions for the head office of the Rosies charity.

According to Cooley, in the first phase of the D-Link contract, 90 laptops in the junior school were wirelessly connected, and within the next 12 to 18 months the college aims to provide wireless connectivity for all 1300 students.

Cooley said the complete network and wireless infrastructure upgrade of the college’s network centres involved the installation of D-Link's xStack DGS-3600 series of Layer 3 managed Gigabit switches, which are now responsible for network routing between all of the school's subnets.

“From an uptime perspective, the D-Link DGS-3600 series complements Iona's disaster recovery strategy. It allows the college to physically extend the network switching stack from the primary server room to the secondary server room without requiring a complex routing or switching configuration. This allows automatic failover of its network routing without having to reconfigure any servers.

"By using a dual 10 Gigabit fibre link between the two rooms, the switches are able to connect over their internal backplanes at full speed," Cooley said. "This achieves a single core network over two buildings as if it was wholly in one building. That means, should our primary server room fail, we can be confident in the integrity of our core."