Public school Eton College recently contracted UK systems integrators Data Integration and Extreme Networks to install and manage a campus-wide gigabit Ethernet network connecting 400 buildings and 2,000 pupils and staff, with an Ethernet-based Wan link into ntl:Telewest’s network.

The original ATM Lan, which provided 622Mbit/s of bandwidth in the core, 100Mbit/s to about 60 edge switches and 10Mbit/s to each desktop and laptop, was not delivering enough bandwidth and was hard to manage.

The project was originally conceived in March 2005, but the timely arrival of Extreme’s latest Summit 450 switch almost halved the expected starting costs, according to the College’s head of ICT Liam Maxwell.

‘My predecessor calculated the original project at £280,000 but it came in at £147,000 because the technology had changed. The four new Extreme Summit switches gave us what you would get in a Black Diamond for the price of a ProCurve – it was pure luck that Extreme came out with those switches at that time,’ says Maxwell, who also evaluated core switches from Alcatel, Cisco and HP ProCurve.

The college was previously spending about £100,000 a year on the old ATM network in support and maintenance, so expects the upgrade to pay for itself
within three years of the new five-year contract with Data Integration.

‘It also makes my life much easier, particularly as the EPICenter graphical network management program lets me see exactly what is going on,’ says Maxwell.

The school uses a lot of email and streaming video – Maxwell is also a biology teacher and runs full Mpeg videos over the network for display in the classroom – as well as in-house and online school administration applications. There are also systems that make sure no one is accessing unsuitable content online and ensure that both lights and laptops go offline at the same time each night.

No cabling upgrade was required and the installation was further helped by the fact that the existing ATM ring had two cores for redundancy, meaning the old network could stay up and running on one core while Ethernet was configured on the other.

‘We did have lots of issues with network authentication; the boys logged their laptops off and went home and logged back in again from their home networks, then came back and logged back into the school network. That created problems but Extreme quickly rewrote the Summit XOS operating system to solve it,’ says Maxwell.

Eton College is already working to add wireless Lan access points to the network, and wants to make more curricular resources available over the internet, including streaming school concerts.

‘We might also move to putting video IP security surveillance and voice over IP online in the future,’ he says.