And provides faster links between campuses
Kirsten Bolinger
Public relations assistant
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia
A yearlong project to upgrade Avondale College’s information technology network is increasing capacity and providing faster links between campuses with little increase in costs.
Chief information officer Simon Short and programmer Ben Reuter say the upgrade to Avondale College’s information technology network improves service and delivery. Credit: Ann Stafford.
Features of the upgrade include:
- Consolidating the number of intercampus links and the number of Internet connections from seven to five
- Moving the Sydney campus from the Sydney Adventist Hospital local area network to the Avondale College wide area network
- Increasing the speed of the wide area network from 1.5 to 100 Mbs
- Increasing the speed of the link between the Hunter Valley campus and the wide area network from 1.5 to 8 Mbs
- Changing Internet service providers
- Increasing the speed of the Internet connection from 8 to 40 megabits per second (Mbs)
- Moving servers hosting the website to a commercially operated central data centre
- Upgrading computers for staff members on the Sydney campus
- Upgrading on-campus servers
The upgrade means Avondale now maintains the wide area network for all its campuses. It also means the speed of the link between the Lake Macquarie and Sydney campuses increases 65 fold, which will significantly improve access to the Internet, access to the network and the quality of videoconferencing. The ADSL link between the Hunter Valley campus and the wide area network remains but the speed increases five fold.
According to programmer Ben Reuter, the consolidation of the links and the change of Internet service provider helped keep the cost of the upgrade as low as possible. While, he adds, the move of the servers will bring greater connectivity and reliability, which may also save money by providing access to cheaper videoconference and voice over Internet protocol technology.
Chief information officer Simon Short says combining the move of the Sydney campus to the wide area network with the increase in the speed of the Internet connection “provided an architected network solution.” He thanks his colleagues in Information Technology Services, Internet service provider Vertel and the information technology staff members at Sydney Adventist Hospital for helping to manage the project. “It was a team effort and it went very smoothly,” he says.