AT-A-GLANCE

Technology in Education: Reimagine the Classroom Network

Highlights •• Delivers a high-performing, scalable, and secure network infrastructure on a limited budget •• Supports One-on-One intiative and BYOD mobility and bolsters student data privacy with policy-based access for students, teachers, and guests •• Simplifies deployments with cloudbased management for school districts with lean IT •• Provides a flexible migration and upgrade path without expensive forklift upgrades with AP and switch integration and investment protection •• Enables continuous network availability for uninterrupted learning and online testing

The New Face of Primary Education Networks Our pervasive use of technology is not only changing how we work and live, it is also transforming primary education in new and innovative ways. In the past, classroom research was primarily paper-based and required significantly more time and exertion. Now, a great deal of classroom research and learning is Web-based. While students still carry books and three-ring binders to keep all their handouts organized and secured, they also use mobile devices such as Chromebooks to access online learning materials. This form of blended learning is the new and current hybrid method of education. More and more student learning is done online in a collaborative model with other students and resources from around the world. While Digital equity remains a civil rights challenge of our time, many students have access to technology that connects them to information and resources 24/7. Many experts agree that 21st century pedagogy in the age of digital natives must align with how students wish to learn. Technology is the key to engaging students, and using the right technology in an educational environment can improve curriculum delivery and student performance. Providing a robust and future-proof infrastructure to support digital learning ensures that a district technology plan implemented in the classroom will have the most successful outcome.

In many classrooms, interactive whiteboards have replaced chalkboards or traditional whiteboards as a powerful new platform for student learning. Every day, instructional technology leaders are evaluating new applications and Webbased tools to help students learn and understand new information—all of which rely on the network. Because the network is vital in so many aspects of the modern educational environment, its performance and reliability must be prioritized and maintained.

The Brocade® Ruckus network access solution simplifies digital transformation by making the wired and wireless networks easy to deploy, manage, and scale. The solution consists of enterprise-class switches and access points designed to provide a resilient, flexible, and scalable infrastructure for a fast, reliable, and secure mobile learning experience.

Brocade Ruckus Network Access Solution for Today’s Connected Schools

Figure 1: Running a solid integrated wired and wireless network to provide uninterrupted services in primary education.

If you are a district superintendent, assistant superintendent, or chief technology officer, the promise of SDN and the benefits of a programmable network in a teaching and learning environment are invaluable. New services such as learning analytics help educators understand behaviors that lead to success or to identify at-risk students. Through learning analytics, schools can collect and integrate more data from multiple sources to support policy setting and decisionmaking.

Building on a Budget The realities of limited budgets and lack of specialized networking expertise on IT staffs are in direct conflict with the greater importance the network now plays in the student learning experience. Schools have the needs of an enterpriseclass network, but most rely on constrained budgets with limited on-site IT staffing and expertise, which impede the path to digital learning. In the U.S., the E-Rate program helps subsidize 2

the acquisition of telecommunications, Internet access, and internal connections to improve their broadband situation. E-Rate modernization and the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) are highlighting the importance of digital learning and educators are embracing it. When planning on how to utilize E-Rate funding over a five-year period, it is important to consider how all the pieces of the education network are working together, ensure that capacity can expand to support network performance and availability expectations, and address increasing security and student data privacy concerns. Merely providing Wi-Fi and the minimum of network bandwidth is not enough. It is becoming more important to invest time and effort to design a future-proof network infrastructure that will allow the network to scale and deliver teaching and Wi-Fidependent learning services as mobility and digital learning requirements increase.

With digital curricula, Common Core testing, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), interactive whiteboards, and video surveillance systems, the quality of education now depends on providing robust network support for both digital learning and administrative requirements. Long-time leaders in network solutions for education, Ruckus and Brocade continue to innovate to bring better performance, scalability, and security to enable high-capacity and high-speed internal connections to broadband Internet access, as well as accelerate mobile learning in classrooms throughout a school or across a district.

Connected Learning Through Resilient Wi-Fi In a 2015 Education Week Survey1, 47 percent of teachers responded that they experienced at least one day of wireless network downtime per two weeks. With the exponential growth of mobile access traffic at schools, district IT administrators are challenged to provide an un-interrupted, higher-speed, and more reliable Wi-Fi experience to students, teachers, and staff. Schools need a Wi-Fi network that can handle a high density of devices with reliability, consistency, and security.

Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi provides the technology that gives schools a cost-effective wireless infrastructure. Ruckus ZoneFlex Access Points (APs) feature BeamFlex, an adaptive antenna technology that monitors the environment and dynamically adjusts the signal to the best-performing path, automatically steering around interference and obstacles. This ensures the strongest signal, highest throughput, and least interference so that classes are focused on learning instead of waiting for a connection. With ZoneFlex, your Wi-Fi network can be configured in minutes through an on-screen wizard. Deploying APs is radically streamlined as well. Only ZoneFlex employs Smart Mesh wireless meshing, eliminating the need to run Ethernet cables to every AP. The mesh capability in APs enables schools to easily extend coverage to temporary facilities, fields, quads, and other areas where pulling Ethernet is not practical or possible. For school districts with lean IT organizations that lack the time or expertise to manage wireless network, Ruckus offers a cloud-based Wi-Fi Management-as-a-Service that enables school districts to install, monitor, and manage a high-performance, multisite wireless LAN of any size without compromising Wi-Fi performance. Whether you prefer employing the Ruckus cloud architecture or migrating to a controller-based infrastructure in the future, your AP investment is protected with the capability to reuse APs with any Ruckus architecture. This AP design provides a significantly cost-effective option as APs are typically 80 percent of Wi-Fi deployment costs.

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A Future-Proofed Infrastructure Campus environments often are multivendor environments in which multiple technologies and vendors must be interoperable. With that in mind, Brocade ICX® Switches were designed to integrate easily with other technologies. Depending on the existing network architecture and its size, network designers have the flexibility to insert stackable Brocade ICX Switches into their network a few closets at a time—or build the entire network and manage it as a single domain. The Brocade ICX 7000 Series Switches can be stacked together with up to an industry-leading 12 switches per stack to form a single logical switch, allowing schools to minimize management overhead while expanding their networks. The fixed-form factor of Brocade ICX Switches combine high performance and reliability with scale-out networking to create a single logical device that is independent of physical location. With options to increase network capacity, school districts can grow their networks as necessary. All they need to do is start with 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) or 10 GbE uplink ports, and upgrade to 40 GbE to deliver sufficient bandwidth. As new applications and devices are introduced to your network and bandwidth demand increases, transitioning to a fabric network will deliver higher scalability and increased network visibility.

The fabric enables you to add switches anywhere in your network and have them automatically provisioned to work in the fabric environment. With only a single point of management for the entire Brocade Campus Fabric network, troubleshooting and increasing capacity are much easier, and uptime is improved. All of these benefits reduce both the stress of operating networks and overall operating expense. Forward-looking educators who have already upgraded their wired networks to support 10 GbE uplinks across the campus are already preparing for the move to 40 GbE in a few years. With 40 GbE available at the price of 10 GbE, Brocade offers the best price/performance for low-latency, high-performance campus networks. Network bandwidth and latency are obvious factors in the success of a wired network, but other important capabilities—such as PoE+, distributed services, open standards, and integration of wired and wireless networks—make the difference in delivering the optimal learning experience. Additionally, with Brocade Network Subscription, schools have the flexibility to pay for network capacity as they consume it without fixed terms. Brocade Network Subscription programs can be used in conjunction with internal broadband services managed by E-Rate or for projects outside the E-Rate program.

The cost-effective, single-layer and mesh design of the Brocade Campus Fabric network is highly reliable, and it lowers costs even further by allowing IT to use a centralized network control plane to share network services and capabilities with entry-level and mid-range switches.

Ruckus Wireless, “Wi-Fi Woes: How Mediocre Wi-Fi Interferes with Instruction in American Schools,” https://fs24.formsite.com/edweek/form266/index.html.

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Simple and Secure Access There is more to digital learning than merely accessing the network. Whether you are adopting a BYOD approach or One-To-One initiative, this transformation is more highly diverse and an expanded set of network users presents a new challenge to provide a safe Internet experience to students with predictable connectivity. Onboarding devices with appropriate policies to all users can be a daunting task, given the growing number and type of devices in education environments. The Ruckus Cloudpath security and policy management platform provides a more effective, easier-to-manage security approach than passwords that can be used with an existing access infrastructure. Cloudpath enables selfservice onboarding that can easily deliver your Acceptable Use Policies (AUP) for each student, faculty, administrator, or guest and all of their devices. By enabling you to leverage your existing wired and Wi-Fi infrastructure to automate device onboarding and enforcement of policies and access controls, you can improve students’ educational experience without compromising security. Cloudpath also tracks information related to users, devices, and policies for all connections to increase visibility into the network and ensure that users have secure access to the right networks based on parameters such as identity, device, OS, location, or time of day. Chromebooks are outstanding in the educational environment for being simple and secure. With Cloudpath, you can deploy the gold standard in security to Chromebooks, EAP-TLS with 802.1X authentication via certificates in an automated manner. Whether issuing certificates from an existing Microsoft CA or through the built-in PKI, Cloudpath ensures every device receives the appropriate certificate without IT having to touch each device. Once installed, 4

the certificate is available for a wide array of uses, including certificate-based Wi-Fi, Web authentication, and more. Policies can be built using powerful new mechanisms, including Google Apps for a seamless Chromebook experience. Importantly, Cloudpath software can also play a valuable role to enable HTTPS inspection along with the content filter engine such that content filtering will work as intended despite a majority of the Web servers’ default setting for encrypted search (like Google). In this way, the students are protected from potentially harmful searches, consistent with CIPA compliance. Apple devices, along with other mobile devices are a core part of the learning experience in the classroom. As more schools implement an Apple-centric learning platform, Ruckus ZoneDirector plays an important role of a Bonjour Gateway to optimize the network for Apple devices. Ruckus’ Bonjour Gateway solution makes it easy to manage and control access to services such as printers, Apple TVs, and file servers across the entire education network. Users of Apple devices can see the availability of those services and use them anytime, anywhere.

Possibilities with SDN SDN not only helps in turning up new services quickly, reducing operations significantly, but it can also provide a better learning experience in education networks. For example, during online assessment windows, optimization decisions must be made. The old process would use Quality of Service (QoS) policies and other mechanisms to keep the online test bandwidth available so multiple actions can be completed within the testing window.

With the Brocade Flow Optimizer application, this process is much easier and less disruptive. Using the Brocade SDN Controller with the Brocade Flow Optimizer, administrators can simply implement a new policy that gives the users, areas, and devices a guaranteed amount of bandwidth. This partition exists separate from the rest of the school network to guarantee bandwidth for students taking the test, and to ensure that other staff and student activities are not impacted during test time. Brocade is developing its own suite of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) applications and also partners with third-party SDN application providers to extend the programmable capabilities of software-defined networks in campus environments. Brocade ICX Switches deliver OpenFlow in hybrid port mode, which enables you to simultaneously deploy traditional Layer 2/3 forwarding and OpenFlow on the same port. This capability provides a pragmatic path to SDN by enabling network administrators to progressively integrate OpenFlow into existing networks for specific application traffic, while the remaining traffic is forwarded as before.

Conclusion The increase in Wi-Fi connected devices in primary education demands better network connectivity and mobility. As schools transform teaching and learning methods through technology, it is more important than ever to provide students, teachers, and staff a reliable, high-performance wireless connectivity experience wherever they are and from any device. As schools refresh their networks and plan for the future, it is important to ensure that whatever network equipment is currently being specified to meet their needs today, that this infrastructure will scale to support the unpredictable bandwidth demands of an increased number of devices and digital learning applications for the next several years as well. Additionally, it is prudent to choose a network that will be reusable or upgradable down the road to protect their investment.

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Open networking solutions and architectures are the future of networking, and are critical to the success of SDN. The Brocade SDN-enabled and SDNready networking platforms such as the Brocade ICX Switch families support OpenFlow, which allows IT to overlay SDN applications that optimize performance and improve student performance. Brocade has also pioneered a unique hybrid port that can run OpenFlow and traditional networking flows at the same time so you can build tomorrow’s infrastructure today and deploy it when you are ready. Brocade and Ruckus wired and wireless solutions, products, and services are open and agile, enabling schools to build networks as platforms for education innovation. The combined solutions minimize IT burden from onboarding devices to scaling out architectures for upgrades and growth. Integrating technology into teaching and learning has never been easier or more engaging.

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About Brocade Brocade networking solutions help organizations achieve their critical business initiatives as they transition to a world where applications and information reside anywhere. Today, Brocade is extending its proven data center expertise across the entire network with open, virtual, and efficient solutions built for consolidation, virtualization, and cloud computing. Learn more at www.brocade.com.

About Ruckus Ruckus Wireless, a part of Brocade, delivers simply better wireless for more than 65,000 enterprise, service provider, government and small business customers worldwide. The company is focused on technology innovation, partner ecosystems and customer service —yielding the best possible wireless experience for the most challenging indoor and outdoor environments. Its Smart Wi-Fi platform delivers scalable, highperformance Wi-Fi with simplified control and management for on-premise and cloud-based Wi-Fi deployments, along with new services for secure on-boarding, policy management, location service and analytics that enable new business opportunities. For more information, visit www.ruckuswireless.com.