Education networks fill as students receive laptops
- 18 March, 2010 14:32
- Comments 2
The NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) networks are almost at capacity.
That is, they would be if it wasn’t for a $70 million deal with Telstra that will double its bandwidth this year.
The DET will soon double its two 1 Gigabit connections to four links between the DET and the Internet, as monthly download levels top 100 terabytes (TB) per month and are set to exceed 200Tb by year’s end.
Chief information officer, Stephen Wilson, said traffic levels surged from 30TB to 60TB per month over four months last year, following the rollout of 66,000 laptops to teachers and year nine students under the Federal Government’s $2.2 billion Digital Education Revolution initiative.
“We expected to run out of capacity and indeed that is the case… this is explosive growth by any means and we have only just started the rollout [of laptops for students],” Wilson said at a Sydney conference.
He said schools ran all applications internally when he began his tenure four years ago, requiring DET staff to download and collate data from servers each week.
Wilson aims to have the thousands of Lenovo student laptops to run like “electricity, so they can turn them on and go”.
But like electricity, laptops can fail and explode — albeit from neglect. Wilson has heard of computers that have been thrown out of a bus window, run over by vehicles, thrown into a dam and even accidentally destroyed by teachers.
“We are doing this early. It would have been done in 10 years time but we are doing it now,” he said.
Wilson said he expects the laptop program to receive funds after the program expires, even in the event of a change in Federal Government.
“The voters of NSW will not put up with this program ending in four years,” Wilson said.
“It is unstoppable. I put my faith in the fact that commonsense will prevail and somewhere, somehow funds will be delivered.”
DET number-crunching
- 1.3 million students — 500,000 K-12 students, 800,000 in further education
- 96,000 employees, including 5500 IT staff
- 500 support staff at schools for the Digital Education Revolution.
- 2411 locations
- 280,000 PCs,
- 7000 physical servers on site at schools and TAFEs
- 3500 virtual servers on site at schools and TAFEs
- 1560 virtual servers in the DET’s two data centres
- 800 physical servers in the DET’s two data centres
- 280TB of storage space which doubles every year for last five years.
- 96 per cent of DET schools are connected by fibre.
Recommended
Join the Computerworld Australia group on Linkedin. The group is open to IT Directors, IT Managers, Infrastructure Managers, Network Managers, Security Managers, Communications Managers.
- Bookmark this page
- Share this article
- Got more on this story? Email Computerworld
- Follow Computerworld on twitter
- Cloud Computing for Midsize Businesses: Delivering Innovation and Efficiency
- ESG Whitepaper: Integrated Computing Platform Survey
- Securing the Promise of Virtualisation
- Advanced Persistent Threats and Real-Time Threat Management
- Integrated Computing Platforms: Infrastructure Builds for Tomorrow’s Data Centre
- HTC unveils new Butterfly s phone that packs more battery life
- 3D printer creates lithium-ion batteries the size of a grain of sand
- Google Glass apps for enterprises coming by early 2014
- iPad 5 rumour rollup for the week ending June 18
- Say 'cheese', Earthlings! Spacecraft to snap home planet pic from deep space
-
Transfield wins $366m in new NBN work
-
Good riddance Google Reader: Feedly throws switch on alternate RSS service
-
Mobile app data protection not our responsibility, say Australians
-
NBN Co should prepare for Coalition government: NBN committee
-
Google adds more retailers for Chromebook
Comments
David
1
Hang on - didnt they only say that 6 laptops were missing or broken last year not a few weeks ago . . now it's laptops in dams, out bus windows etc?
And now they dont even know if they have the money to keep this going
AND they've only deployed 60k laptops out of the 200000+ and already the network has ground to a halt (anyone who has been part of the ongoing rollout will know about latency)
And now they say they dont have any money? This is not a good story . . . what next?
Shelley M
2
When NBN comes they will have the bandwidth. But they might be out of money by then. No more stimulus funds.
Maybe they can take some back from BER, that seems to be running a surplus.