Case Study   3Com Helps Shanghai's Jiading District   Scale New Heights in Education Organisation: Jiading District Education Bureau, Shanghai Municipality, China Students: 80,000 Teaching staff: 6,000 Population: 486,400 Vertical: Government/Education Jiading District Education Bureau oversees an area of 458.8 square kilometers, which includes fourteen towns. Jiading District Education Bureau manages over sixty primary and middle schools with 80,000 pupils and 6,000 teachers. The Challenge Through the activities of its Education Bureau, Jiading District is committed to equipping educational establishments within its jurisdiction with the most up-to-date technology and information resources. The Education Bureau was aware that while many primary and middle schools had successfully built small LANs and conducted many teaching projects online, these networks tended to be deployed and managed on a stand-alone basis. Lacking any degree of integration, there was little opportunity for the schools concerned to make capitalise on their investment by sharing resources. It was also evident that leaving the responsibility for network development down to the schools had a number of other drawbacks. Such inherently limited networks were incapable of meeting the ever-growing demand for the latest multimedia teaching and learning applications. Nor could they support any sort of strategy to modernise school management and administration. Jiading District Education Bureau decided to install a unified communications infrastructure that would allow all the primary and middle schools across the area to improve the quality and efficiency of their teaching and management practices. The proposed network would be required to provide access to the Internet and the Shanghai Municipal Education Information Network (EduInfoNet). There were a number of further objectives, which included connecting the Jiading District Education Information centre, which would be at the centre of the network, with the Shanghai Municipal Education Information Centre and integrating the Jiading District education commission with Shanghai Municipal Education Bureau. The Solution Jiading District Education Bureau chose a 3Com® Gigabit Ethernet solution as the basis for its infrastructure - known as EduInfoNet - which is based the following products: 3Com Switch 4007 acts as the core switch providing a high-speed, high-density, modular LAN backbone. The 3Com Switch 4007 allows for optimisation of the service available to users through the product's combination of extensive CoS/QoS functions and traffic management capabilities. The Switch 4007 is located at the Jiading District Teacher Training College. 3Com SuperStack® 3 Switch 4400 and 3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4400 SE provide optimal-performance, feature-rich Ethernet LAN switching with high port density. The 3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4400 provides Layer 2 switching together with advanced QoS (Quality of Service) and traffic management features to add some Layer 4 capabilities to the EduInfoNet infrastructure. The EduInfoNet has SuperStack 3 Switch 4400 units situated on the office intranet at the Teacher Training College. The 3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4400 SE units are located within the schools. 3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4900 supports Layer 3 switching capabilities to enhance performance, provide network control and security and enable logical segmentation of networks based on virtual local area networks (VLANs). A SuperStack 3 Switch 4900 is located at each of the primary and middle schools in the area. 3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4200 provides reliable, high-performance wirespeed Layer 2 switching in an affordable, easily installed platform. Each of these 10/100 Ethernet switches comes with two gigabit uplink ports. The SuperStack 3 Switch 4200 units are located within schools to provide user access. 3Com SuperStack 3 Webcache 3000 maximises bandwidth usage, speeds Internet access and improves browser performance. As a result, it optimizes the investment in costly WAN links. 3Com SuperStack 3 Firewall connects the Jiading District Education Information Centre to the Internet. It is a secure, flexible high-performance firewall that excels at protecting networks against threats from the Internet and offers highly flexible bandwidth management control, allowing administrators to prioritize outbound applications, such as voice, over non-mission critical traffic. It also offers secure remote browser-based device management, compatible with most web browsers. An optional integrated Web Site Filter service assures acceptable web usage policies for improved productivity, reduced administrative overhead, and protection against legal and social liabilities. 3Com Network Supervisor is a powerful yet easy-to-use management application that graphically discovers, maps, and displays network links and IP devices. It allows network managers to monitor stress levels easily, set thresholds and alerts, view network events, generate reports in user-defined formats, and launch device configuration tools. The Benefits 3Com is seen as a vendor with a long history, extensive products range and impressive market share. The 3Com strategy of lowering the cost of ownership of networks is a very compelling one. 'EduInfoNet' went live in September 2002. Since that time tests conducted by a panel of independent experts have confirmed the network has fully achieved all prescribed targets. The 3Com EduInfoNet gives Jiading District Education Bureau a scalable, powerful and reliable network that has already proven more than capable of delivering a full range of bandwidth-intensive services such as Courseware on Demand, access to the Internet and other educational resources and management applications. The 3Com EduInfoNet has substantially improved management and administration processes such as student record and academic results management. The ability to share information online has not only made more materials available to teachers in preparing their lessons, but also improved personal efficiency. Most notably, the new EduInfoNet has enabled the Jiading District Education Bureau to integrate a range of entertainment and exchange-oriented modules with a number of key information resources to form a consolidated online education system. The completion of this system is a significant milestone in the deployment of Jiading District's e-learning strategy. Many schools have taken the opportunity to create new services such as virtual communities and electronic bookstore as well as provide online study, teaching resources and courseware on demand. Students can even take examinations online. The EduInfoNet solution features 3Com's complimentary network management software, 3Com Network Supervisor, which has allowed the specialists managing the network to devise and implement a unified security strategy. Shen Quanming, director of Jiading District Education Bureau Information Centre, said: "As part of Shanghai Municipal 'Interschool' Network, Shanghai Jiading EduInfoNet makes heavy demands on core switch performance. That is why we emphasised powerful functions, high performance/price ratio and good expandability during the network equipment selection process. We chose 3Com because the company's products were shown to be able to fully meet all these requirements."