ACADEMIA

Exinda announced that Eira High School has deployed its 6760 Series WAN Optimization Appliance to prioritize applications on its network, identify problem users and accelerate WAN performance.

Eira High School is a private secondary school in Helsinki, Finland. It serves 2500 students with a Gigabit Ethernet network and 370 workstations. Like any educational institution, Eira High School must ensure fast and trouble-free access to network resources and the Internet for both administrative and educational purposes. Without a means to visualise and control network utilisation at the application and user level, however, the school was 'flying blind' and hoping that each application would have enough bandwidth.

Specifically, Eira High School wanted to ensure priority bandwidth services for its VoIP system and key administrative and educational applications, and to be able to identify users who were accessing unauthorised content (i.e., entertainment and gaming sites) and causing an unnecessary strain on the network.

"We have some problematic students who prefer spending time online having fun instead of attending classes and studying," said Göran Strömstén, IT manager at Eira High School. "We wanted a way to be able to identify these users immediately and to control how they used our network."

Other challenges included identifying when a particular workstation was dropping packets, and identifying when one student shared his or her logon credentials with friends so that there were multiple workstations in use that were logged in with the same user ID and password.

After evaluating several WAN optimization and packet shaping devices, Eira High School chose the Exinda 6760 WAN optimization appliance supplied by Exinda partner Data Monitor of Helsinki. "The Exinda system gave us better visibility into our network, better control over it, and it was easier to use than the other systems we evaluated," said Strömstén.

"We have also achieved an increase in overall network efficiency, an ability to identify students who shared passwords with other unauthorised users, and the ability to see at a glance whether any user or application was using an inappropriate amount of bandwidth."

Eira High School also uses the Exinda appliance's edge cache to streamline Internet and web site access for frequently used content. "The cache simplifies our network because all popular content goes into the cache and is served from there rather than having to be delivered over the network every time. We have reduced network accesses for that kind of content by about 60 percent," said Strömstén.

"Thanks to the Exinda appliance, we now have a highly efficient network that delivers the right amount of performance to every user and application."