Diocesan Catholic Education gets hardware upgrade

Datacom subsidiary NetOptions has won a contract to supply HP’s hardware equipment, ProCurve Networking, to the Catholic Education Office in the Diocese of Rockhampton.

The deal is part of the Diocese’s Connecting Classrooms initiative, worth around $600,000, which is aimed at brining 28 primary schools and eight secondary colleges across Central Queensland online.

The initiative has also been partially funded by the Queensland State Government's ‘Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Capital Assistance Scheme’.

The ProCurve procurement contract comes under the Diocesan Catholic Education Office’s existing supply agreement with HP for desktop and server infrastructure.

It will see some 28 5300-series switches for the administrative centre of each of its primary schools, plus an additional 5300 series switch for two of the larger schools and 50 2600-series switches for distribution across school buildings, have been purchased.

Diocesan Catholic Education Office and NetOptions signed the purchase agreement in December 2005. The switches were delivered in January 2006 and the implementation program, managed by the Diocese’s IT department, will be completed by June.