Using bandwidth to improve education investment
Connecting to KAREN has reduced UCOL’s connectivity costs and improved productivity across two campuses.
UCOL moved the “heavy hitters” out, they increased bandwidth between the two campuses and then they put in a sophisticated disaster recovery (DR) programme – all through KAREN.
The heavy hitters
UCOL is home to more than 10,000 students who Google, email and spend a lot of time on YouTube. The result? Bandwidth congestion and reduced network performance. UCOL IT Director Steve Sorsby turned to KAREN to help solve these problems and avoid the need for expensive investment in bandwidth.
“Using KAREN, we moved student email to Microsoft Live @ Edu. YouTube was a major killer, taking 80 percent of our bandwidth, so we moved that off our network. Then we moved Google traffic away,” says Steve.
The result? Capacity is freed up for business-as-usual, internet users have a better experience and UCOL can target funding to where it does the most good – student education.
As Steve says, “when it comes to things like YouTube, the need for larger pipe is never-ending and meeting that need is not economically viable for UCOL”.
Better business-as-usual
UCOL has two campuses – Wanganui and Palmerston North – and shares students who must be able to work in real-time from either location. “The previous 100Mb pipe was costing us a lot of money and increasing numbers of students moving between the campuses were putting pressure on that pipe,” says Steve. Now, with KAREN’s 1GB connection, UCOL has 50 times its previous capacity.
KAREN is also part of UCOL’s DR systems. Every 20 minutes, Wanganui and Palmerston North send a full data back-up to each other using different internet service providers (ISPs). “If one site fails, we re-route traffic and back-up through KAREN,” says Steve.
Congestion and performance are not unique to UCOL and the solution to ever-increasing bandwidth is to engage with services such as KAREN which can provide increasingly sophisticated services beyond the reach of any one organisation.