Learning the downside of free education devices

The old infrastructure, Doepel’s plan originally went, was to be removed and installed in CEOP’s 56 primary schools – the “poorer cousins” in the system, which typically struggle for funding. “The plan was to do an enterprise infrastructure plan, and given the amount of funding that was available I knew it would take six years to do,” Doepel explains.

“This was one of my biggest challenges – to convince them to put a controlled IT spend into the budget, and not only have a feasible infrastructure, but an IT strategy going forward. There were just so many things that needed to be done.”

The parameters of that plan changed rapidly, however, when CEOP received more than $150m of additional funding under the government’s $16.2b Building the Education Revolution (BER) program. This funding was meant to cover a broad range of infrastructure, but Doepel was given 10 per cent of the total – the $15m mentioned earlier – and virtual carte blanche to build an infrastructure that would position it for the demands of the modern technology-driven pedagogy.

Suddenly, Doepel had the resources to design a technology vision for CEOP schools – and execute on it. A major component of this was to improve communications links within and between the schools, as well as shifting CEOP’s data centre to a third-party site (it ultimately moved into Sydney’s Global Switch site).

This project was accompanied by a migration from Novell Directory Services and Groupwise to Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange; the implementation of Cisco Systems VoIP and unified communications capabilities; consolidation of nearly 80 separate student information system (SIS) servers onto a single Oracle instance; improvement of server and switching redundancy; and related efforts such as a 40TB storage area network, based on technology from CommVault, to ensure student and staff data was centrally backed up.

Backed by significant funding, Doepel worked with Catholic Network Australia, a consortium of Catholic schools that pooled their buying power to contract Telstra for the supply of inter-school fibre services at speeds of up to 100Mbps. This was supported by 10Gbps aggregate backbone connections to the Global Switch data centre.

“We decided the only way to maximise the new infrastructure was to run optical fibre between every school,” Doepel says. “”We were able to use Telstra to build out our own NBN, and we now have optical fibre between every one of our sites.”

Bandwidth blessing, bandwidth curse. That’s not the end of CEOP’s story, however, but rather the beginning.

The problem with providing massive bandwidth, as the organisation soon found out, is that 50,000 users quickly learned that they could get online at previously unimaginable speeds. As might have been expected, data volumes quickly skyrocketed – but not even Doepel was expecting data volumes to get so high, so quickly.

“All of a sudden everything just worked,” he recalls. “The schools’ connection issues went away. So, instead of tens at a time, hundreds at a time could connect. But when everyone wants a piece of the pie, our bandwidth utilisation went absolutely crazy. We had been downloading on average 40TB of data per month, but we are now downloading 400TB per month. No one expected that level of growth; we are victims of our own success.”

The boost in aggregate demand has forced CEOP to update much of the infrastructure it put in just a year earlier, boosting its switches, routers and firewalls to 10Gbps models. Even the sheer volume of data being managed has exploded: with each school wanting its 5TB or more of data to be backed up, the original 40TB SAN filled up quickly; CEOP has subsequently complemented it with 110TB of scalable network-attached storage from NetApp that can be expanded to store 3000TB as demand requires.

“All of a sudden everything just worked. The schools’ connection issues went away...but bandwidth utilisation went absolutely crazy. We had been downloading on average 40TB of data per month, but we are now downloading 400TB per month. No one expected that level of growth; we are victims of our own success.”

This level of growth would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago, but with network-hungry cloud computing gaining in popularity and a steady influx of mobile devices boosting demand on the networks – CEOP will buy more than 5000 new iPads this year alone – Doepel hopes he’s bought CEOP enough headroom to last for a while.

His focus is now shifting from expanding technology to inculcating a technologically sustainable teaching culture across CEOP’s staff. “We can’t sustain this growth [indefinitely],” he explains. “We’re not building all this because we’re nice people; we’re building it to enable learning using 21st-century tools. My job is to make sure staff and students can get where they want to go quickly, simply, and without any complication.”

“But it’s been a real challenge,” he adds, “to educate the leadership teams, finance departments, and others so they understand what we need to do to enable this pedagogical model to work. We’ll continue to work with educators to make sure that when they come up with a scheme to do something, we’ve got the infrastructure to support it.” – David Braue

This case study originally appeared in the April/May 2012 issue of GTR.