Mazenod College

Lesmurdie, Australia. 850 students. Fast switching delivers 45x faster downloads

Founded in 1966, Mazenod College is a Catholic secondary college for boys in years 7-12, located in Lesmurdie, Western Australia. College founder, St. Eugene De Mazenod, originally called for students to “Leave nothing undared for the sake of the Kingdom.” That same spirit prevails today, as Mazenod College uses technology to give its students every opportunity to achieve academic excellence.

Setting a High Bar for Performance

With the transition to digital learning, the college’s network runs everything for the school, from its wireless, Voice over IP, and Closed Circuit Television systems to learning, student, and content management solutions. With so many operations dependent upon it, it simply cannot fail. However, the aging LAN switches had reached their limits and could no longer cope with the growing demand of traffic from wireless, laptop, tablet, and interactive data projection devices.

The College uses Microsoft OneNote to organize work, deliver curriculum, and collaborate with students. Each of the 850 students has his own virtual folder with e-books and classwork. In class, teachers project content onto a white board, and as they write on the board, the content is instantly replicated to the students’ laptops. For the network, that means delivering at least 4.5 gigabytes of data simultaneously to all students in the class. In the past, it would take up to 15 minutes to m