Hong Kong: St. Stephen's Girls' College Upgrades to 10GE Campus Network Powered by H3C

Background

St. Stephen’s Girls’ College, located in Hong Kong’s Western district, is one of the oldest schools in Hong Kong. Founded in 1906, St. Stephen’s has an outstanding IT history: it was one of the first secondary schools to run the HKCEE Computer Studies curriculum and first networked its campus in 1998 under the IT Pilot Scheme program. As St. Stephen’s entered its 101st year, the college found itself facing a 90,000 square meter campus with multiple buildings and a burgeoning student population. The college’s aging 1GE network was not powerful enough to cater for the increasing demands being placed on computer resources by online educational systems and the daily online activities of students and teachers. St. Stephen’s turned to H3C to transform their campus-wide network into a modern online platform to offer a more interactive learning process and accommodate future teaching technologies.

The Solution

As part of its 100th anniversary celebrations, St.Stephen’s is re-building its associated primary school and, along with H3C has upgraded its IT systems. Providing a reliable, high speed network environment was an essential element of St. Stephen’s IT upgrade strategy. H3C designed a stable ring topology using its advanced solutions, so network performance between St. Stephen’s central buildings with 300+ workstations and the server farm which is comprised of almost a dozen servers, would not be affected by a single switch failure.

H3C installed its versatile S7506R high-end multi-service switch as a core switch in the historic Main Building to improve performance and expand bandwidth. H3C positioned its S5600 intelligent multi-layer switches in the Hsu Ta Tung and Jubilee buildings for stackable, resilient growth and high availability. Rounding out the upgrade, H3C placed multiple units of its innovative H3C S5100 desktop switches, throughout the Main Building for high-speed, secure access points.

Why H3C?

After consulting with numerous vendors, St. Stephen’s Girls’ College found that only H3C offered a tailor-made campus network solution, which was most suitable to the school’s needs for high value technology at a reasonable price. H3C’s switching solution provides rich service functionality, along with a powerful QoS guarantee and complete security management. In addition, H3C’s trained service teams impressed St. Stephen’s with their technical proficiency and professional network planning advice.

The Benefits

To help carry the institution into the 21st century, St. Stephen’s Girls’ College needed to lay a more solid IT foundation to increase the effectiveness of their educational instruction. H3C provided a total campus network upgrade solution to St. Stephen’s, backed by excellent pre- and post-sale support, making it the first K-12 school in Hong Kong to deploy a 10GE network solution.

St. Stephen’s network is now easily expandable for cost-effective growth and the deployment of networked-services, like Video on Demand. H3C’s carrier-class reliability, 10GE performance and easy management has enabled St. Stephen’s to deliver multimedia learning environments, allowing teachers and students to fully utilize the school’s network, now and into the future.