Parade College has overhauled its campus network with the help of communications solutions provider, Mycom, which identified the school’s networking requirements before designing a solution involving the deployment of Brocade hardware.
Parade College is a secondary school with two campuses in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. It was established in 1871, and its existing network supports 1200 desktop PCs, 140 wireless access points, IP telephony, and 180 CCTV cameras.
It sought to update its network on back of increases to its student body, the introduction of always-on tablet computing, and the growing demand for connectivity.
“We’re going to be expanding from 1800 to 2200 students in the next few years and are also planning to equip all our students with tablet devices, which is certainly going to drive network traffic higher,” Parade College IT manager, Daniel Caporetto, said. “The existing network infrastructure was dated and consisted of different vendors, which created management issues.”
“There was no redundancy in the system and the amount of throughput it could support was already over-subscribed. We therefore determined to deploy a new, single-vendor solution to support traffic growth, as well as improve reliability and manageability.”
As a result, Mycom worked on a solution to integrate Parade’s two campus networks, with a focus on the network core which previously depended on a single switch and was identified as both a bottleneck and a serious potential point of failure.
Mycom’s solution specified the deployment of Brocade ICX 6610 Switches at the network core to remove this vulnerability and boost bandwidth. The switches can be stacked using four full-duplex 40Gbps stacking ports that provide 320Gbps of backplane stacking bandwidth.
The access layer within Parade’s new campus networks is provided by Brocade ICX 5430 Switches with power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities to support IP phones, cameras, and Wi-Fi access points. With up to 48 1GbE ports per switch and additional ports for stacking and unlinking to the core, the Brocade solution promises enterprise-class performance and reliability.
“With the Brocade ICX Switches, Parade has a non-stop network core with scalability to meet its future needs and a plug-and-play access layer, all of which can be managed through the same software,” Brocade Asia-Pacific (APAC) vice-president, Charlie Foo, said.
