How one North Carolina School
District Uses Wireless to Expand Learning Opportunities Beyond the Classroom
Located in North Carolina, the sprawling
Rowan-Salisbury School System is an educational force to be reckoned with. It
comprises 35 schools, about 20,000 students, and about 3,000 employees. It’s
the largest employer in Rowan County.
The
sprawling Rowan-Salisbury school system is an educational force to be reckoned
with
Like many others, Rowan-Salisbury was
facing the growth pains that come for school districts that embrace high-tech
trends: it needed to accommodate an influx of Apple iPads, iPod Touches,
laptops, and other popular Wi-Fi-enabled mobile devices, on its wireless
network. The decision to change wireless networks was based mostly on this
growing wave of devices.
“We used to, in the old days, provide a
laptop cart with an access point,” said Phil Hardin, Executive Director for
Technology for the Rowan-Salisbury School System, “So if you didn’t have a cart
in your room, you didn’t have wireless access. But now the learning
opportunities are expanding beyond the classroom. We want our students and
staff to take advantage of those learning opportunities, so we wanted to make
our campuses able to support that with wireless.”
Deployment
In
the Rowan-Salisbury School System, the wireless network supports about 700
mobile devices, plus about 400 laptops
In the winter of 2010, Hardin and his team
began an Aerohive wireless LAN pilot program at one school in the district.
That went well, so he decided to broaden out the wireless test with a business
showcase, which included members of the public, at a school on a Saturday.
“Everything worked flawlessly,” he said.
“We knew then that the product, in terms of providing us with the service and
the bandwidth, was going to be there.”
These days, in one typical school in the
Rowan-Salisbury School System, the wireless network supports about 700 mobile
devices, plus about 400 laptops. That particular campus has about 35 to 40
Aerohive APs, Hardin said.
Implementing bonjour gateway
The
Bonjour Gateway feature to manage and control Apple service availability
Hardin also praised Aerohive’s new,
patent-pending Bonjour Gateway. To make networks service-aware and make BYOD
with Apple devices a native part of every network, Aerohive is introducing the
Bonjour Gateway feature to manage and control Apple service availability (such
as AirPrint, AirPlay, file sharing, collaboration applications, etc.) across an
entire enterprise-class network. “We’re very excited by this feature, because
we use iPads in our one-to-one program,” Hardin said. “We use separate VLANs
for students and teachers, and that security separation makes it difficult to
fully use AirPlay and AirPrint in the classroom, we’re excited by Bonjour
Gateway because it integrates the technologies we’ve already chosen-into our
learning environment.”
Result
The Rowan-Salisbury School System turned to
Aerohive, with its cooperative control access points running 8o.ɪɪn technology
that didn’t require network controllers or overlay networks. Unlike
controller-based solutions, where there is a single point of failure, Aerohive
APs work together to recover from component failures without the need to deploy
redundant systems. In selecting Aerohive, the school system made a bold
decision to completely change WLAN architectures.
The bottom line? Hardin said he would
absolutely recommend Aerohive to others. “It was probably not the most known
product when I first started looking at it. But the more I looked, I thought:
this is just a really neat product. And then when we started doing the tests,
everything that they said the product would do, it did. It’s just been a great
experience for us.”
