CACHEBOX rescues Saint Bernard
ApplianSys is pleased to announce that San Bernardino City Unified School District – the tenth largest district in California – has chosen CACHEBOX to guarantee speedy content delivery in the classroom for 1000s of students and teachers.
The district’s 10Gbps core bandwidth pipe caters for more than 53,000 students and 7,000 teachers, with each of its 73 school sites connecting via a 1Gbps WAN pipe. But even with all this capacity the large 1:1 population regularly accessing Google content were experiencing too slow a service.
Even worse, with entire classes of students accessing the same content at the same time – especially at the start of lessons – the sluggish arrival of Google content would simply multiply the problem and crash the network. Many sites reported the network as down simply because Google content was so slow.
Elliott Gotfredson, Network Specialist at San Bernardino City, had recognised the need for caching early on: “If the majority of Google traffic could be cached and delivered at WAN speed, then all that [bandwidth saturation] would go away.”
He knew that the tremendous peaks in traffic and web latency wouldn’t be solved by upgrading the WAN link’s bandwidth. Only caching could guarantee faster content by storing and serving content locally – at LAN speeds – without using bandwidth.
“We know that there will always be dynamic content you can’t cache, but if we can reduce our WAN utilizations to just the dynamic content then we are also lessening the load on Google and the other web content providers, which helps them too,” says Elliott. “It will also assist with all the testing we do, the majority of which is web-based (Illuminate, SBAC, etc).”
The district’s firewall highlighted that demand often outstripped throughput – proving that the student learning experience was slow and problematic. Not wanting to wait for an E-Rate application, Elliott sought a schools-focused caching solution.
After contacting ApplianSys, an initial solution of three CACHEBOX420s at the network core was proposed. Realising CACHEBOX’s value as a dedicated schools’ appliance offering far more than expected, the district quickly approved budget and deployed the CACHEBOXes.
“After seeing the results from caching at other large school districts like Anaheim, CA and St John, FL, Elliott wasted no time in signing up to CACHEBOX,” said Sophie Clark CACHEBOX Consultant.
About
San Bernardino City Unified School District has 73 schools – catering for over 53,000 students and 7,400 staff. With a mission to deliver “learning experiences beyond traditional boundaries of where and when”, the district looks to leverage technology to maximise blended learning opportunities for its students.