Bandwidth-busters busted at Seneca
ApplianSys announced today that Seneca R-7 School District, Missouri, has purchased a CACHEBOX solution to facilitate its 1:1 programme and ensure reliable multimedia delivery to students.
The school district comprises four schools linked over a fibre network, with around 2000 connected devices.
IT Director at Seneca, Nathan Busteed, says: “We upgraded from 20 to 50Mbps last July but added more devices than previously planned. On average we were only using 28 of 50Mbps, but at the start of lessons – which is peak times for us – we very nearly maxed out our bandwidth.”
Brad Smith, Sales Executive at ApplianSys comments: “Many students at Seneca use Chromebooks. Each time a machine is switched on the system automatically checks for and applies any new updates that it finds. When this happens in the hundreds at the beginning of the first class, the connection at Seneca becomes impossibly slow.”
Nathan says: “We had the option of upgrading to 100mps but I heard of CACHEBOX’s success at Webb City R7 Schools and wanted to look into a web cache appliance first. Given that we wanted to provide an additional 500 Chromebooks and 400 tablets next year, followed by more in the next few years, we would soon outgrow 100Mbps anyway.”
Automatic system updates, such as updates for Chrome OS, require only part of a file to be downloaded. But simple caches are only effective when a whole file is requested, and so are incapable of caching these. CACHEBOX easily copes with ‘range requests’ like this, so that all requests can be served from cache.
Seneca Schools bought a CACHEBOX230 to serve student requests across all four school sites.
Brad comments: “Nathan made a smart decision increasing Seneca’s existing bandwidth capacity sooner rather than later. CACHEBOX relieved the beginning of lesson peak times and delayed the need for a bandwidth upgrade. Students can now quickly access online resources, and value the excellent browser performance in class.”
Seneca R7 School District serves the small town of Seneca in the Southwest of Missouri, near the border with Oklahama. It includes Seneca Intermediate School, Seneca Junior School, High School and Elementary School.