Asante, maker of high quality networking equipment, has announced that an Evanston IL school district has upgraded their network with high speed Asante equipment. The Evantson/Skokie school district will be using IntraCore 8000 10/100/1000 multi-service switches to power their new network. The school district has also given Asante the highest of praise, rating Asanteis equipment as top notch. According to Asante:
Evanston/Skokie School District Asant? Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: ASNT.OB) recently announced that the Evanston School District has completed a successful upgrade of 15 schools to switched 10/100 Ethernet to the desktop and a switched Fiber Optic backbone in each school using Asant? Technologies, Inc. IntraCore? 8000 10/100/1000 multi-service switches in all wiring closets. The new network supports moving data/voice/video over Ethernet/IP.to a fiber optic-based network using Asant??s IntraCore? 8000 in all fifteen of the district?s K-12 schools.
Evanston used switched 10/100 Ethernet to the desktop Evanston chose to useand switched 100BaseFX as the backbone technology for the initial installation, with the ability to upgrade to a switched Gigabit Ethernet backbone in the future. The modular flexibility allows Evanston to use switched 100 Mbps Ethernet over fiber technology as the backbone today and upgrade to switched Gigabit Ethernet for the school backbones if and when they need it.IT staff may choose to deploy video over network in the future using the IntraCore 8000?s switched Gigabit Ethernet backbone.
Scalable Technology for Growing Student Population
The IntraCore 8000 offers has a unique very cost-effective 100BaseFX uplink module that makes deploying a switched 100BaseFX backbone very inexpensive. In addition, Evanston can upgrade the uplink to Gigabit Ethernet in the future. In addition, the combination of the 8000?s stackable architecture, 3 expansion slots and 8 port 10/100 switch expansion modules allows the 8000 to be scaled from 24 to 192 switched 10/100 ports per stack in ?bite-sized? 8 port incrementsSwitches can be expanded in as few as 8 port increments -- minimizing investments in unneeded port capacity. The IntraCore 8000 stacks installed in each schools main distribution frame stack can support up to 12 switched Gigabit Ethernet ports, providing more than enough switched Gigabit ports for even the district?s largest high schools when they decide to upgrade the backbone from 100 Mbps to switched Gigabit Ethernet ? without having to install new switches.IntraCore Grows with Evanston
The Evanston IT team has just completed the first major phase of installing the IntraCore 8000 systems. Each school has 1-3 wiring closets each, and from 100 to 550 ports. There are 6 data connections per classroom, 5 serviced by an IntraCore 8000 and 1 by legacy 10 Mbps Ethernet equipment. Finally, all closets are linked together with 100 Mbps fiber. The district?s network has evolved from 600 computers to 2400 units computers online; next year, another 1,000 computers will be added.Now that Evanston is several weeks into the 2001 academic year, IntraCore is easily living up to expectations. Students are swarming in computer labs, and teachers are enjoying the exponential jump in bandwidth. In the distant future, the district will look at moving to voice telephony, and possibly video. "We?re beginning to work on that, but for now I?m going to be installing a new mini-mainframe on a separate network," says Scarsi, "and based on our experience we?re definitely going to use the same IntraCore 8000s on this upcoming administrative network," he said.
You can find more information about all of Asanteis products at their web site.