As part of theCube’s continued coverage of the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas today, Wikibon founder Dave Vellante met with two practitioners from HP customer, Sao Paulo State University in Brazil whose network supports about 60,000 users; among these users are roughly 45,000 students and 10,000 faculty members. Each faculty member has their own VoIP device connected to the network, equaling 10,000 managed VoIP endpoints. The campus, and therefore its network, is connected across 23 cities, supported by five regional nodes, with the main node located in the capital of the state. The network consists of two rings and a total of 40 WAN nodes.

The team manages over 300 physical servers, 60 percent of which are virtualized using VMware; a project that the university began in 2008.

The video provides some great insight into how an institution can embrace new technologies and the necessary change that comes with being innovative. Read the article and Watch the video.

theCube began its live coverage of the ~11,000-attendee HP Discover conference in Las Vegas today. Wikibon founder Dave Vellante and Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman kicked off the interviews with Gregory Bell, an HP customer and Head of Technical Services for Ballarat Grammar School in Australia. Vellante asked Bell how they deal with competitors when it comes time to purchasing new equipment. “We most certainly look at other vendors for servers, storage, notebooks, etc. – we put them all on the table, make our comparisons, and perform our due diligence,” Bell replied.

Bell described one of Ballarat Grammar’s more recent and tasking projects driven by the school’s initiative to provide a 1:1 pairing program for its senior students. With this program, the school opted to provide every student and staff member with his/her own HP Netbook running Windows 7 and a copy of the full version of Microsoft Office. Ballarat Grammar’s biggest hurdle with this initiative? Handling all of the additional devices connecting to the network via mobile hotspots throughout the school.

One of the key challenges described by Bell included that, at any given time, the network could have as many as 500 mobile devices connected. Bell said that HP’s wireless network and servers, 99% of which are virtualized, are running Windows in VMware and are managed by vCenter, allowing up to 900 devices to connect at any given time – all viewing rich content such as classroom videos from YouTube.

Read the full article by the imsmartin team on SiliconANGLE and watch the video to see and hear the list of some of the key challenges that HP helped Bell overcome at Ballarat Grammar School.

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