(March 29/2012) The proliferation of technology in classrooms has made clear a reality with which many network administrators struggle: You can never have too much bandwidth.
In this age of one-to-one computing and “bring your own device” programs, distance learning and cloud-based applications, students, teachers and staff have come to expect that the network on which they rely during the school day will deliver the resources they need, when they need them. But making do with a patchwork network is no longer enough. As many school IT departments have discovered, at some point, the demands these emerging technologies exert on a network make a major overhaul imperative.
For the University School, an all-boys private school with campuses in Shaker Heights and Hunting Valley, Ohio, that moment came in 2010, when school leaders decided to launch a one-to-one program and realized their aging network wasn’t equipped to support it.
“The years had taken their toll,” says Director of Technology Jason Hiett. “Our internal capacity, bandwidth and throughput were getting choked out. We also were having problems with some administrative systems slowing down or being inoperable.” Reboots were a common occurrence, he adds.