Cloud delivery the next big step
Sunday Business Post - Best Schools Supplement, published on March 13, 2011

True to their form in leveraging the latest technologies, the Meath VECs are already accessing infrastructure and applications from a private and public cloud. County wide services are delivered out of a private cloud hosted in the HEAnet data centre. ‘‘We have virtualised each school’s infrastructure and upgraded their broadband connection. Two schools and our head office are on the 100Mbps scheme,’’ said Seamus Ryan.

Wi-fi networks have also been deployed into the schools at considerable expense. Ryan thinks it is money well spent. ‘‘Wi-fi is as important as telephone lines, water and electricity. It is the key to connecting schools to the real world. If you don’t have that, how can you call yourself a 21st century learning environment?’’

A unified communications platform is another important innovation. It already facilitates remote learning with video conferencing – small schools can ‘‘drop in’’ on lessons in larger schools – and there are plans to roll out IP telephony that will save even more money. ‘‘We think we can cut telecoms costs in half within 12 months,’’ said Ryan.

Across the VECs there are around 1400 computers, running Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010, all managed centrally from the data centre by three people. ‘‘We manage everything at a local level from a distance without having to provide onsite maintenance,’’ said Ryan.

Managing a smart infrastructure in this way has other cost-saving benefits, including energy management. All the PCs are switched off simultaneously at 4pm across the county.

Core application such as Microsoft’s Exchange, SharePoint and System Center software are all managed in the private cloud, while 5,000 Hotmail accounts and online storage are run off Microsoft’s public platform.

‘‘Long term, the infrastructure at a school level will be drastically reduced. More and more of the processing and management will be done in the public cloud,’’ said Ryan.

With the cloud model in place, it becomes easy to scale-up and roll out the service. There are plans to leverage the same infrastructure for close to 50 schools in the region.

School principal Tom Stack with students of St Fintina’s Longwood, Co Meath, clutching their Fizzbook Spins