It's back to school and administrators and teaching staff are busy preparing for the new school year.
Wrong technology picks include things like $79 retail appliances sprawling throughout the campus network. Throw a packet sniffer on the network and the amount of overhead (broadcasts and packets) equates to blocked arteries. Never mind control because there is none. But this is always a reactionary effort attempting to meet a need, just like in SMBs that go awry when there's a pain point and someone tries to lessen the pain with an out-of-the-box or off-the-shelf solution.
Temporary pain relief using $79 solutions will be ever popular. Administrators don't always view convergence the same way we do, and they rightly see their mission of education as their priority. But the technology impacts their operations, even in their mission to provide the best possible education to their students. But do the administrators see their environments as "campus" environments, and do they appreciate the value of convergence?
Recently I read that a group of educators had agreed that 1-Gbps was the accepted norm for school and campus networks. A 1-Gig network doesn't buy a lot of convergence comfortably. All of our schools have a 1-Gig backbone and it's usually enough but not all the time. When the server is blasting out workstation images in the summer (reimage effort), the network isn't friendly. When we install WiFi, users just appear and then there's huge growth. Education is no longer static, just like phones and telephone systems--they are now drawn into the churning pool of change and convergence: Paging systems, network security cameras, access control to and from the building and now wireless controls placed on HVAC systems to save schools money on energy costs. Our schools also want to stream video for morning and special announcements.
I've listened to some discussions about using some cool features from Cisco, and "port fast" is similar to another feature that ADTRAN uses, called "edge port mode." Both accomplish the same thing: the spanning tree protocol is excused (a soft override takes place) and the workstation NIC connects faster. For the user, the experience is less waiting for that 20-30 second period to expire before getting an IP address assignment. Another feature in VMware is NIC Teaming and on the switch side aggregation, which assigns multiple ports to combine one larger port.
My buddy that advises me on fiber suggested early in the year that we start implementing 10-Gig fiber for our campuses. We deployed our first in late July and it doesn't mean we are using 10-Gig out of the gate, it just means the fiber is capable of supporting 10-Gig. We've yet to start installing 2.5 Gig fiber hardware in our switches. We can also "aggregate" these links, creating a larger pipe/backbone.
Our schools have two emergency action plans in place and we are reviewing how we can help them engage in "Emergency Communications" using basic tools equipped with UC clients. I have to say my server buddy's "Thin Client Reading Lab" was the coolest project yet. The attributes include being low energy, fast, easy to maintain and use, but in the end, the low cost to implement is what got that project moving. Another cool project I think we will see shortly is more deployments of the newer alternative to computer labs and PCs on school desktops from GreenBridge Computing solutions that don't use PCs, thin clients or zero clients, but rely on Windows MultiPoint Server. They state that users realize a savings of 50% on hardware and 80% on energy.
Convergence isn't necessarily on campus administrators' minds but if it's something that reduces costs, improves performance significantly or provides a value or even saves energy; then the time to move from selling and educating to deploying the solution decreases. Campus administrators are in tune with the general business dynamic of wanting more for less and solutions that are better, faster, cheaper and easier to use and maintain. The campus remains a huge opportunity and still challenges us to leverage the right piece of the puzzle at the right time for the best effect.
