CACHEBOX appears on Oprah!
ApplianSys is pleased to announce that the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, Gauteng, South Africa, has purchased a CACHEBOX solution to help save bandwidth, improve browsing experience for its students and minimise administration.
The academy is home to over 400 students and 150 staff members. Its 40Mbps bandwidth connection caters for around 700 school-owned devices. However, several hours of network congestion occur each day:
- During class time, teachers directed students to specific video and other media-rich content. When this content was requested simultaneously, it quickly saturated the bandwidth and slowed browsing speeds. This led to wasted classroom time.
- Even after school hours, residential students would access various social media sites to stay connected with friends and family. Traffic from these sites also led to congested bandwidth.
Network Manager Mark Nwangang was concerned how best to tackle it. He knew bandwidth was insufficient, but wanted to avoid an expensive upgrade. He realised that caching could be the answer, so installed open source caching software on a general purpose server to store and serve popular content locally.
However, manually keeping the content up to date was time consuming. Without support it quickly proved difficult to maintain – and worse, it didn’t alleviate the congestion problem.
Mark decided to look for a supported caching solution that was simpler to use but affordable. He found CACHEBOX to be ideal. Pleased with its track record of high performance caching in schools and easy, intuitive management interface, Mark decided to deploy a CACHEBOX230 in the school’s network to handle all content requested from the devices.
Roger Clark, ApplianSys Head of Sales for CACHEBOX, comments: “CACHEBOX has been designed with schools for schools – and is priced to be affordable on a school budget. Its intuitive interface makes initial configuration and ongoing management quick and easy.”
“More and more school-specific content is delivered via HTTPS – and CACHEBOX makes it easy for schools to deal with this. Its HTTPS caching can save bandwidth in school networks with a large amount of HTTPS traffic by caching content from specific education online resources and popular social media sites.”
About
The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls (http://www.owla.co.za/) based in Henley on Klip, in the Gauteng province of South Africa, opened its doors in January 2007. Ms. Winfrey, through personal donations, contributed more than 40 million dollars toward the Academy’s creation.