[By NBC-1TV H. J Yook]Building on the success of its campus LAN and core network upgrade, the Australian Capital Territory‘s Daramalan College has become the first high school in Australia to deploy Brocade’s Ethernet fabric to support its IT operations. The decision to move to the third phase of its network infrastructure upgrade with Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) has seen the college deploy Brocade® VDX® 6720 Switches and VCS® Fabric technology to replace its legacy server access infrastructure. The decision was driven by anticipated traffic growth from current applications, including real-time video streaming and the college's administrative suite, as well as increased demand for higher network performance.

Daramalan College is the largest single-campus independent secondary school in Canberra, with a strong focus on leveraging IT to support teaching and learning as well as administrative functions. Over the last two years it has undertaken a comprehensive revamp of its network infrastructure with local Brocade partner, Correct Communications, culminating in the entire network being characterized as a “best-practice” design.

“With the improvements we‘ve made to the core network and campus LAN, it was obvious that server access had become the performance bottleneck,” said Rob Wilson, Daramalan College’s IT manager. “In a sense we‘d become victims of our own success. Staff and student usage has become more intensive since the campus network upgrade, and I’m expecting traffic to at least double in the next two years.”