Wireless takes off

Wi-fi, iPad and desktop virtualisation – holy IT of Trinity

Thank heavens there was a robust wireless network in place before the devices went marching in.

When the headmaster of Trinity Grammar came knocking at Evan Hughes’ door with an idea for a pilot of 360 Apple iPads, the school’s IT director likely breathed a sigh of relief.

Hughes had not long installed an Aruba wireless network that he says meant there was little to be done to the main Summer Hill campus network to accommodate the devices that drink up bandwidth for multimedia.

“We added a few access points in a few areas of the school but we didn’t have to modify any of the structure – just added an invisible network name – we had infrastructure and it wasn’t difficult for Accucom to work on this,” says Hughes, referring to the project’s systems integrator.

Trinity, established in 1913, now has 2000 boys and 500 staff at its 

three Sydney campuses; the biggest at Summer Hill that caters to years three to six and seven to 12 has an Aruba wireless network to support 1600 devices including nearly

600 notebook PCs and 100 Apple Macs in addition to iPads. And it runs Microsoft Active Directory, Windows Server 2008, Exchange 2010 and desktop virtualisation.

Summer Hill was a patchwork of wireless networks, which restricted teaching and use of mobiles. The Aruba network was scaled to deal with saturation coverage of scores of devices – “a good decision”, Hughes says, because of the growth of devices. The decision to build

its information infrastructure on the web browser is also supported by the deployment of Microsoft Sharepoint for collaboration and the intranet, Hughes says.

Like many IT managers, Hughes has spent the past few years looking to a time when the ratio of devices to users exceeds unity and most of those will be owned and managed by their users.

Part of that change is at the core of the school’s Denbigh administration system, which the 

vendor is rewriting to support the wider choice of client devices that will need access to it, Hughes says.

A school of intellectually precocious boys presents a challenge to make a chief information security officer blanche, so Hughes has restricted access to safe online sandboxes where virtual classrooms will sit.

“Aruba has some tools that can help us and we’re looking at how to integrate that into the system here to limit any frivolous registrations and track what happens. We have 1600 devices on the network and I can see that at least doubling when policy changes and users can register their own devices.”

He says for some users, the devices they choose will be determined by the day’s agenda, “and that’s where you need to provide flexibility”.

A consequence of the changes is that desktop virtualisation is on the agenda so users “can work on a standard Windows machine through their mobile device”.