Silence is golden

Behind the scenes: FCAC infrastructure upgrade By Darryl Humphreys Dean of eLearning and Head of Technology

In early October, Facebook and its affiliated services such as WhatsApp and Instagram suffered an outage that left 3.6 billion users unable to get their daily fix of cat videos, catch up with the latest stories and pics from their influencer of choice or grab a bargain from Facebook marketplace. And what caused this issue? Faulty configuration on hardware that routes data between users and Facebook’s vast array of servers. Talking IT infrastructure rarely generates much excitement, except when things stop working, and users find themselves unable to access services that we all take for granted. Information technology plays a pivotal role in every facet of daily life of the College, and I would like to take this opportunity to provide readers with some of the projects that have been implemented by the College to not only keep our systems running more efficiently on a day-to-day basis, but to also future proof our infrastructure to meet increasing demand and growth.

Over the course of last year, significant investment in the College’s core network has occurred to improve both availability and reliability. The addition of 36 new Cisco Meraki switches to our network provides a 10GBit connection to each classroom block to further facilitate teaching and learning. Paired with this increased internal bandwidth is the rollout of 110 new Cisco Meraki wireless access points to improve connectivity across the campus. A new Cisco firewall and content filtering solution is currently being installed and this will also be paired with an updated onboarding solution to streamline student connectivity as part of our BYOD program.

The College’s connection to the outside world has been doubled, jumping from a 1GB connection to 2GB, while this has also been paired with a redundant link to provide a backup connection if required. To further support teaching and learning in the classroom, the last 12 months has seen the installation of over 30 ultra-short throw interactive projectors with further rollouts planned for 2022.

The IT world never stands still however, and future major works planned for 2022 and beyond include replacing the fibre optic backbone that internally connects the College to allow for further increased bandwidth capacity and redundant links to all buildings. Finally, preliminary work is underway to migrate a number of the College’s core services to the cloud with projected improvements in security, redundancy and service up-time. While these projects are not cheap, this ongoing investment is integral to ensuring the College continues to provide staff and students with the opportunity to experience all that 21st century learning has to offer.

Finally, I would like to finish by acknowledging the fantastic support provided by the College’s IT team. Led by the Director of IT, Mr David Hodges, Matt, Kapil and Jasper can be found working tirelessly behind the scenes keeping things running smoothly and providing vital support to both the College’s staff and students. Page 20ww