One morning, there was no connectivity whatsoever in our admin wing and the staff couldn’t work.
Graham Francis, Director of IT Services at Havering Sixth Form College
The Background
A large five-building campus for 2,500+ full-time students and 250 staff, Havering Sixth Form College in Hornchurch, Essex provides outstanding full-time education to 16-19 year-olds.
The Challenge
An ageing HP-based LAN core network was increasingly limited in speed, scalability and performance (100Mbps and 1Gbps uplinks), with failures and downtime a regular occurrence, impacting on teaching and administration; an underpowered wireless network with weak security; unreliable end-of-life cabling.
The Solution
Redesign and replacement of core and wireless infrastructure following competitive tender including: flood wired CAT5e structured cabling and dual resilient fibre optic uplinks to core Cisco Catalyst 6500 with Virtual Stack Core design; Cisco 2960-S Switches with 10Gbps uplinks; VLAN segmentation for security; lightweight wireless network with centralised management.
The Result
A far more resilient, scalable and secure high performance network delivered at a fixed price to further improve teaching and learning and enhance the student experience at this forward-looking sixth form college. Daisy Professional Services handled design, implementation, migration of staff and students, and full project management. The project came in on time and to budget.
