Melbourne college drops Cisco, deploys HP Procurve

By Peter Dinham
Monday, 04 May 2009 14:33

Strategy

Melbourne’s Luther College has replaced its Cisco system with HP Procurve in a recently completed major upgrade of its network, allowing the secondary school’s 1,000 students to access multimedia learning resources and advanced software applications.

HP ProCurve says it has deployed the high performance 10G Ethernet network, as well as undertaking major upgrades to network management tools, which achieved significant reductions in support costs.

The Luther College win is a feather in the cap of HP Procurve as it seeks to peg back the dominance of Cisco across most market segments including education. HP won the deal based on lower support costs compared to its rival.

Christopher Topp, CTO for Luther College, a large private secondary school in the Melbourne suburb of Croydon, says the school’s wireless LAN covers the entire campus and allows students to access information via laptops.

“Classrooms are equipped with multimedia projectors connected to computers, allowing teachers to deliver lessons via computers, and teachers are able to coordinate homework assignments and provide further assistance to students via web based information portals, which students are able to access from home.”

Topp says that “almost every class we teach involves a substantial amount of computer based material, with data stored centrally on our servers. The demands on our network have grown exponentially over the last few years, and our previous network was creaking under the strain, and costing us a fortune to support.”

According to Topp, to reduce ongoing support costs and improve application performance, the college had decided to migrate to a ProCurve gigabit Ethernet solution, with the entire migration carried out in a single week during a school break to minimise disruptions to teaching, with the installation project managed by Computelec.

Topp also says that when the college decided to upgrade, it evaluated the five year cost of ownership for the new network, and “once you start to add up support costs, moving to ProCurve is an easy decision.”

HP says the network solution deployed for Luther College includes a fault tolerant ProCurve 8212 switch located in the computer datacentre, with high performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet fibre links used to connect the datacentre to various buildings, with ProCurve 5400 switches and ProCurve 3500 series used at the edge of the network.