Not very elementary

What business has more than 100 employees simultaneously saving gigabyte files of video over a gigabit network five days a week? Here’s a hint: it’s not some fancy animation production house. In fact, it has nothing to do with the film or TV industry.

Australia’s top schools are rewriting curricula for the 21st century and in the process overhauling their networks to provide the required performance.

Creative arts such as drawing and painting are being replaced by digital design, video editing and DVD creation. These are all highly resource-intensive applications in their own right, but their concurrent use by several classes pushes out the storage specs beyond even the standard commercial set up.

Since Brisbane Girls Grammar digitised its curriculum, the school’s IT department has seen storage double every 18 months. Instead of a teacher lecturing in front of the class, students are encouraged to grab information themselves through Internet research.

Brisbane Girls has just finished building a six-storey creative learning centre for music, graphic arts, art and drama and IT subjects. The expansion added another 200 PCs to the network, bringing the total to 750 machines.

“If you’ve got any commercial entity that is 1500-plus people, you have a reasonable sized network,” said Data#3’s account executive, Richard Holden. “The difference is of course in a commercial environment you’re not running 100-plus apps; you might be running a few dozen at best.”

The floors of the centre are designed so that students from several classes can work in large groups, with teachers moving around the room. “That means we can have three classes writing to the same system at the same point in time,” said Nathan Pilgrim, IT director of Brisbane Girls Grammar.

There are also 13 computer labs which are booked out solid every period. “We could put a lot more labs online and still fully book them. The demand for IT in the school is just going up and up because that’s what is driving schools these days,” said Pilgrim.

On top of teaching requirements, the IT infrastructure must also carry the administrative processes such as finance, purchasing and student records.

The education department is also adding its own technically onerous demands to the mix. In conventional pursuits, teachers were required to take a photo of each student making their artwork, but in the digital world, the IT department must take snapshots of students’ files at multiple stages.

Thanks to the ease with which digital files can be copied and altered, progressive copies are the only way a school can prove that students made digital artworks themselves.

“That information has to be kept for up to 12 months after the student leaves Year 12 so they can go back and review their portfolio of work,” said Pilgrim.

Another driver is the plummeting price of flash storage. Five years ago, a USB drive came with 64MB, but now students have 4GB or more in their pockets. “We need to provide that (storage) in schools so (students) are just not keeping all their work on the school’s servers and can access it at home,” said Pilgrim.

A gigabit Cisco network handles the massive bandwidth requirements, with gigabit connections to all desktops, gigabit switches and multiple ether channel trunks to buildings.

The school was already running a 5TB SAN, an entry-level HP MSA1000, was already creaking under the strain late last year and couldn’t keep up with 750 desktops. “The performance of the SAN just couldn’t keep up with the demand of that number of machines accessing it at one time,” said Pilgrim.

The new SAN is a mid-range HP EVA4000 chosen for its performance. The load is shared through four drive shells for better throughput and dual-channelled HBA adapters for performance and extra cache.

Data#3’s enterprise specialist Alan Bellert recommended HP’s Enterprise Virtual Array mainly because it was easy for the five-person IT department to manage.

“The EVA has light-touch management, they can scale from one model to the next up the tree fairly seamlessly. The EVAs are one of the best performing storage arrays on the market.”

The EVA range is expandable to 6000 or 8000 series through a straight controller upgrade and adding more drive shells and hard drives.

The storage array is virtualised with VMWare, which makes a big difference to assigning capacity to servers, said Pilgrim.

Virtualisation has cut rebuild times in the case of a disk failure from several days to hours.

The school is also in the process of upgrading its servers to blades, and will introduce virtualisation over the next 12 months to consolidate 16 servers to six. The storage upgrade cost around half a million dollars, said Pilgrim.

Despite its tech-heavy status, Brisbane Girls could go further — it has long debated whether to introduce laptops to replace desktops.

However, adding the cost of a laptop to already-high school fees could force away lower-income parents. And some parents may not believe that a laptop is the best way they want their children educated, said Pilgrim.

“There is a discussion, does the school become a laptop school? But not all parents want to send their kids to a laptop school,” said Pilgrim.

Data#3 has outfitted other top private schools with similar systems costing between a million to a million and a half dollars. The reseller is now talking to others in the highly lucrative private school sector about providing consolidated services just like a business partner operates in the commercial sector.

The model would operate around a three-year strategic blueprint for each school, with Data#3 providing auditing, planning and implementation.

For Australia’s well-funded private schools, the wheel keeps turning. Before the storage and server upgrade, Brisbane Girls had just invested in desktop management and deployment.

Once Brisbane Girls has finished the transition to digital graphic design, the next stage will be hosting work online in a similar way to social networking site MySpace.

“Then we bring on learning management systems which have more storage requirements and then the next stage and the next stage,” said Pilgrim.

“The demand for IT in the school is just going up and up.”

“But not all parents want to send their kids to a laptop school.”