Lindbergh lessons roll along

ApplianSys today announced that Lindbergh Schools District in St Louis, Missouri has become the latest US schools district to choose CACHEBOX to solve bandwidth issues in its schools.

Lindbergh Schools had a 40Mbps connection to the Internet with each school connected to each other on 100Mbps links.  With a legacy software cache in place, this was sufficient at the start of the year for the 2800 users at that time, all with internet access.  However, Lindbergh Director of Technology Mariano Marin-Gomez knew a move to allow students to bring their own laptop to school, with up to another 2000 users, would change this and so he planned ahead by checking on CACHEBOX.

“Now, as expected, we are closing in on our bandwidth limits. Bandwidth costs are already $2500 per month and increasing capacity would add significantly to this. Ongoing traffic growth means we have to act now. A modest investment in deploying a cache now will allow us to delay higher bandwidth costs for some 7-8 months, and continue to save us money after that. With a rapid payback at about 2 months and annual savings of around $30k, our finance director did not need much convincing! We’ve only just deployed CACHEBOX, but we are already seeing a 40% hit ratio with bandwidth savings of 10Mbps. So far, user complaints regarding bandwidth have disappeared.”

Roger Clark, CACHEBOX Head of Sales, commented “US schools districts like Lindbergh are well provisioned with bandwidth. However, it’s often not enough for long. They are also well provisioned with computers, which means bandwidth demand continues to grow at 75-100% pa.  And their bandwidth is not cheap like the ADSL we have at home. The cost savings from CACHEBOX are significant, particular now with tight public finances. Yet it’s even more important to these schools that their user experience is not disrupted by bandwidth shortages – the IT team soon hears if lessons start to suffer. Lindbergh have managed this in a rational way, and are planning to add a further unit down the line as demand continues to grow.”

Lindbergh Schools (www.lindberghschools.ws) serves a community of approximately 46,000 residents in a 23 square mile area, located in the southwestern suburbs of St. Louis. It is home to more than 5,600 students at one high school, two middle schools, five elementary schools and an early childhood education center. Lindbergh is the #1 ranked K-12 schools district in Missouri for academic achievement.