CACHEBOX hot in Chile university

ApplianSys announced today that Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso (PUCV), Chile, has replaced its existing caching solution with CACHEBOX, to help maintain its BYOD scheme.

The university has 17 buildings, with a central internet connection serving around 2000 simultaneous users. Over the past 2 years a caching solution – comprised of four (Squid + Linux-based) servers – was in place to help save bandwidth and speed up browsing for its users. However, this was proving difficult to maintain and delivering inadequate performance.

The existing solution was deployed explicitly, which meant client browsers had to be configured in order for requests to be saved to and served from the caches.

CACHEBOX sales executive Francesc Amador explains: “Configuring thousands of devices on the University’s network was impractical. As a result, many devices were not using the caches and only around 20% of the traffic was being cached.”

Network Administrator at PUCV Felipe Lopez adds; “With our BYOD scheme, we need to cater for hundreds of notebooks, tablets, iPads and smartphones, making thousands of requests simultaneously. During peak times we use 200-250Mbps of bandwidth. 60% of that traffic is YouTube videos, Facebook and Gmail. Our caches were unable to tackle bandwidth congestion and students couldn’t access the internet quickly.”

Felipe sought an appliance to solve these issues once and for all. He found that CACHEBOX was ideal: “We’ve bought a pair of CACHEBOX310s and will be deploying them as a transparent WCCP cluster so traffic will be cached regardless of the client’s settings. It’ll be easy for us to add more units if additional capacity is required. On top of that the user interface is very intuitive, making it so much easier to administer and configure network and cache settings.”

About

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso was founded in 1925 and is one of the four major universities in Chile’s third largest city. It attracts over 13,000 students from different areas in Chile, in addition to hundreds of exchange students from Europe and North America. The University has a central campus in downtown Valparaiso and its colleges are dispersed across Valparaíso, Viña del Mar, Quilpué and Quillota.