IT highway between home and school
IT highway between home and school
A Victorian Independent school has embraced a new IT infrastructure that makes it easier for students to transfer work from school to their home and has also reduced the previous stresses and strains of managing the school's network.
Woodleigh School has deployed the Avocent SwitchView IP device, which is connected to an eight-port KVM (keyboard, video, mouse switching device) switch to allow multiple servers to be managed from remote locations so that data can be controlled more easily.
The school has three ICT laboratories, a sophisticated intranet portal, notebooks for classroom use and USB memory sticks for students to transfer work between school and home.
It was suffering problems of managing 11 network servers across two campuses, as well as the core administration needs of its 750+ students, which prompted it find a more sophisticated management process.
Stephen Fraser, the director of IT services at Woodleigh School said. "To meet the requirements of our dynamic IT infrastructure, we currently have eleven servers in mixed Netware 6.5 and Windows 2000 environment, split over the two campuses.
"Pre November 2003, to perform any server related activity, our technicians had to physically be in front of servers. So managing our server network was an increasingly arduous task. I reasoned there had to be a more efficient way to manage the network.
"We now have the ability to monitor our servers via the SwitchView IP console from our desktops and the technicians can even log in from home if required.
"The SwichView IP was easy to set up, easy to use, stable, has markedly improved our operations and we've never experienced any problems with the device. It just works."
Eight of the eleven school servers can be managed from home, access can be made via a Web browser and out-of-band access means that servers can still be available even if the network goes down.
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