Keighley College has an excellent reputation locally, regionally and nationally providing quality education and training. In addition, the College has proved to be extremely forward thinking technologically, willing to invest in its IT infrastructure providing its students with an excellent facility for both now and the future.
BACKGROUND
The College operates a large network using a Novell v6 cluster for 500 plus users (both students & the administration function) over three servers and connection to a SAN. The network is based on CAT5E and fibre. The system was experiencing severe speed problems with slow log-ins, bottlenecks and slow file transfer times.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Before any recommendations could be made, SICL conducted a network audit. Primarily two problems were highlighted – the servers were unable to cope with the network traffic efficiently and the switches were both un-manageable and unconfigurable. SICL recommended upgrading the central infrastructure replacing the old servers with HP Proliant Servers and a layer three switching environment giving 10/100 & Gigabit to the desktops.
RESILIENCE & SPEED
Due to heavy demand on systems, the college required resilience but also speed. It was decided therefore to install a central core switch giving direct connectivity for the servers and over 200 users. This was achieved by installing an HP Procurve 9315 Routing Switch. An additional six HP Procurve 4100 switches were connected to the core switch in a spanning tree loop configuration. The direct connections were allocated 2Gigabit network Connectivity for additional speed.
A FIRST
The installation at Keighley College of the HP Procurve 9315 Routing Switch was the first of its kind to be installed in the UK, but underwent rigorous pre-installation testing routines.
READY FOR THE FUTURE
Because of SICL’s extensive experience in the networking arena they were able to advise the college the best way forward for the future. The switching environment provides automatic broadcast control, traffic prioritisation and reservation of bandwidth which allows the college to deal with future multi-media teaching aids. In addition, the college is well equipped for growth and expansion without further expenditure.
"We have seen good performance improvements and the reliability and speed of operation have improved considerably."
David Wilson
Information Services Manager.