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Education K-12 – Connected Schools Both public and private schools are starting to understand the need for advanced communications networks within the classroom. Many new capabilities are available with a communications infrastructure. Teachers, who constantly face the challenge of providing new and exciting material to their students, can use the Internet as a source of content and curriculum ideas. The students can make use of advances in Computer-Based Training, which delivers an effective, individually paced educational environment. Administrators can take advantage of a connected classroom to improve efficiency by creating electronic grading and classroom organizational tools. Additionally, it is becoming and ever more important requirement that all members of society be proficient in computer use. What better place to start than at school? Of course, to deliver all these capabilities on an acceptable budget is a big challenge. MRV’s OptiSwitch™ product line provides cost effective switching and routing solutions with extremely flexible, scalable configurations. This ensures an easy-to-deploy environment with no wasted resources – if a classroom needs only a few Ethernet links, then only a few needs to be purchased. Additionally, MRV provides a wide range of inventory-saving modular products for school systems with many facilities. Modules and chassis can easily be moved from place to place as needs change over time. In this ‘school-district’ environment, interoperability is also a key issue. MRV equipment fully conforms to all relevant industry standards, including IEEE 802.1, 802.3 and all IETF routing protocol standards (such as RIP and OSPF). Our products are also easy to deploy and manage. The MegaVision Web™ Network Management System provides a complete solution for managing all MRV and other 3rd party products with a Web-based interface. Security is another major concern at school. Some kids today are more proficient at computers and networking than their teachers, and so the network must provide a means of preventing malicious attacks and privacy violations. MRV provides a completely secure environment using both 802.1q VLANs and Ethernet and IP-based packet filtering for intrusion control. The OptiSwitch™ product line also offers powerful bandwidth-control features, using Ethernet Circuit technology to prevent unauthorized usage of scarce Internet connection resources, and to prevent Denial-of-Service attacks from within the network. College and University Campuses Universities have long been at the forefront of network-technology advances. The Internet owes its existence largely to University researches and the need to exchange information around the world. Today, college campuses are still leading the way towards next generation networks. Part of this is due to the ever-increasing amount of information to exchange with other researchers. The virtual observatory project, for example, is an international collaboration designed to create a database of the sky that researchers from around the world can access through the network, instead of through the telescope. Many other applications are also important to the campus network. The students’ educational process, as well as their quality of life depends on their access to computer technology and the Internet; of course some students take advantage of this situation by trying to use up all the bandwidth for music sharing instead of class-work. A high-speed network benefits the whole organization and allows such applications as on-line curricula, Alumni programs, and even course-work over the Internet. All of this, coupled with intra-department networks, makes college campus networks some of the most complex in the world. To implement the varied requirements of the students, faculty and administrators, the IT staff must create a flexible, scalable network. MRV provides an array of products to help solve these problems. For the transport part of the network, the FiberDriver™ product line provides many media converters, repeaters and Wave-Division Multiplexing (WDM) products. These products can be used to create multiple connections running over the same fiber-optic infrastructure, each serving a particular need (for example, one pair of fiber could transport data between two physics buildings and at the same time transport data between two administrative buildings without any interference between the two networks). These fiber-optic products include storage protocols and voice connectivity to present a complete solution for interconnecting the whole campus via fiber. WDM technology can also be used in a very simple fashion to increase backbone bandwidth, by connecting multiple streams of Gigabit Ethernet between buildings on a single pair of fiber cables. In some cases fiber-optic cabling is unavailable, such as after the acquisition or construction of a new building. MRV’s TereScope™ line of Free-Space Optics (FSO) products solves this problem in an ingenious fashion. By sending light over the air, instead of through a fiber, FSO allows two buildings to be connected together without any cabling. This solution is quick and easy to deploy, and in many cases saves money over leasing or laying fiber. FSO technology requires only line-of-site (there are no radio transmission licenses to deal with), and provides over Gigabit speeds, reliably and securely. For the data-communications network, MRV provides a complete range of Ethernet and IP switching and routing products, through the OptiSwitch™ line. These products are modular, flexible and scalable. The OptiSwitch™ products provide a cost-effective solution for any Ethernet and IP connectivity, from a few 100Base-TX ports to over a hundred Gigabit Ethernet ports of wire-speed IP routing, and everything in-between. The OptiSwitch™ Ethernet Circuit technology also provides a full solution for security and bandwidth control, preventing unauthorized students or faculty members from accessing prohibited part of the network, and from abusing the bandwidth of the network for personal reasons. In large campus environments, the network management process can be complicated and cumbersome. With MRV’s MegaVision Web™ Network Management System, together with the In-Reach™ and LX Remote Presence Management solutions, this task is centralized and simplified. Remote Presence technology allows the administrator to access any part of the network either in-band (through the network itself) or out-of-band (through the telephony network) for management purposes. MRV’s solution even includes the ability to manage the power connections of remote servers, so that an administrator can force a crashed server to power-cycle without ever leaving the office. As with any mission-critical network, the campus network must be highly fault-tolerant. MRV products provide a robust solution to this problem with many fault-tolerance capabilities, including remote management, hot-swappable modules, and redundancy protocols (such as Rapid Spanning Tree). MRV also provides a complete range of optical-layer redundancy products where multiple fiber-optic cables can be used to protect against fiber-breaks or equipment failure. To find out more about MRV solutions for K-12 and College/University campuses, contact your MRV sales representative, at sales@mrv.com. |
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