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McAuley School:
Case Study for the implementation of structured LAN and WLAN infrastructure in a secondary and sixth form school.
Introduction:
This case study aims to describe the benefits of a secondary and sixth form school implementing a structured and well designed LAN and WLAN infrastructure and highlight why DIS should be considered and chosen as a long term partner to deliver these solutions.
The Partners:
The McAuley Catholic High School is a Roman Catholic, Co-educational Voluntary Aided Comprehensive School. The school was opened in 1981 following the amalgamation of St Peter's High School & The Catherine McAuley Upper School.
"Our aim is to provide a wide variety of skills for our students, and in particular, transferable ones which will be of great use after leaving McAuley. Those who learn to analyse and communicate ideas effectively are in a strong position in most Further and Higher Education courses and careers."
DIS Formed in 1983 specifically to supply specialist networking services to major UK VAR's and end users within the computer industry. They are specialists in the design and installation of Cabling Infrastructures, along with the design, Installation and Support of a wide range of Network Hardware solutions including: Wireless, Security, VPN, Voice and IP Communications
DIS has substantial Installation experience spanning some 24 years. With our own in house design and Engineering teams working on a daily basis within the Commercial, Retail, Manufacturing, Foods, Education, Health, Local Government, Home Office and Ministry of Defence Sectors.
DIS has held ISO9001.2000 Quality Management System accreditation since 1997 and works in partnership with it's sister company d2 Information Solutions who are specialists in providing IT Solutions for SME and mid-market companies, including server virtualisation, IT storage, server consolidation and data replication.
The Network Was Working:
The original US Robotics wireless network was working when it was originally installed to run the Bromcom e-Registration solution, but as soon as other devices were added to the network it came to a grinding halt. This was due to the access points not being able to handle many simultaneous devices and the configuration being one single network. An external consultant recommended that DIS were brought in to run tests and analyse the results.
Cost Based Options:
DIS designed a new network solution with three options based on functionality versus cost. Each option was scalable and upgradable and McAuley were told all of the facts so that they could make their own decision without any "sales" pressure. They were able to choose the most cost effective options that would provide optimum performance and ease of management. We recommended the introduction of layer 3 core switching and a resilient Gigabit fibre backbone. On top of this, 60 wireless access points were installed across the three site campus, due to the dispersed size and also because of the building's physical density etc.
Specific Demands of a School:
As a network for a school, there is an upsurge in activity at the start of a lesson where users are logging in and retrieving files. There is another spike at the end of the lesson where work is being saved to the networks' storage servers and users log off from the active directory.
Resilience via the Spanning Tree protocol is required as every class registration is done over the wireless network and critical examination sessions require 100% uptime and reliability. Data security is also critical; therefore the VLAN architecture protects unauthorised access to the various virtual networks available.
High Availability Wireless:
McAuley rely heavily on the wireless network, both for the Bromcom registration devices, but most of the pc and laptop access is done this way. This has been very easy to achieve and has reduced the amount of workload on the IT department involved to give these users network access, which at the same time is still secure, monitored and controlled. All access to the internal network is limited to authorised areas and Internet usage is controlled and monitored via the IT team.
VLANs:
The Network uses VLAN and Spanning Tree technologies to offer separate "virtual" networks and routing failover so that any client on the network is secure and limited to accessing the services it has authority to use. This has been enabled due to the ability of the Cisco access points being able to handle multiple users accessing multiple VLANs, which the old network could not handle. The network is divided into VLANs based on geographical and departmental requirements with each of the following segments made up from multiple VLANs (we use a technique called "micro segmenting").
Each of the following are general service area headings which the micro segmented VLANs access
1. Curriculum
2. Admin
3. Bromcom
4. IP Telephony
Further VLANs can be easily added for any future advances such as CCTV or Access Control, or other services as yet unknown, due to the logical labelling used from the start. IP Telephony is currently used as an IT staff resource to enable them communicate with each other from anywhere on the network, but could be a future Campus-wide project. This feature has Quality of Service, or QoS, enabled even though it is over the wireless network.
The Gigabit fibre channel resilient core network is ready to cope with any increase in numbers of users and additional future services that may be introduced. McAuley now has a trouble free, scalable network that is easy to manage, enabling the IT staff to get on with managing application service delivery and new projects instead of dealing with network problems. The resilient fibre core is configured utilise fast ether channel at full duplex giving 4Gb throughput between all cabinets at all sites.
Trusted Support:
Bryan Coe, who is in charge of the Network, was very complimentary about how DIS worked in partnership with the school. From the initial technical response, through the various commercial offers, installation and ongoing support, he was very happy with all aspects of the relationship. In his words he "couldn't ask for more". He liked the fact that they had one technical and one commercial single point of contact, backed up with solid support and fast responses whenever required. Support calls were handled very quickly including the use of remote tools enabling requests to be actioned much quicker than expected.
Installation and Upgrade Cycle:
The sympathetic way in which DIS have worked with McAuley means that older, legacy hardware has been re-used wherever possible, usually in non critical areas, until it is end of life, and then replaced by state of the art Cisco kit which is the evolved brand of choice because as Bryan states "you get what you pay for". This has made the whole process into an installation and upgrade cycle which continually addresses any changes in the school's needs without significant commercial impact.
Recommendation:
Further Information and Contact Details:
DIS can be contacted on 01274 869099 or e-mail info@disnetwork.co.uk
Bryan Coe can be contacted via DIS and is happy to answer any questions.
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