Announcing the new range, Mark Hirst, Product Manager at T4 Data Centre Solutions with Canon Technologies, commented, “Children’s lives revolve around IT. At home with PCs, game consoles and smartphones. And also in the classroom with multimedia displays, interactive whiteboards and increasingly iPads and student computers.”

And he adds: “Taking this idea even further, just this month, Brighton City Council in the UK has endorsed plans to allow children to use their smartphones to access e-learning in the classroom and at home.”

Mark Hirst explained that delivering all this content requires each school and institute to have the full functionality of a small data center. However, a serious problem in many schools is the lack of space for a data center and the skills and resources to manage and maintain one.

Drawing on its experience in the data center sector and in miniaturization, simplification and minimizing maintenance in the military sector, Cannon Technologies has solved the problem for schools by developing the Mini Data Center range, a complete data center installed in a single rack or enclosed cabinet - which can be located in a corridor, in a closet or in an outdoor parking lot or playground.

The new range includes sophisticated self-management systems along with cooling equipment, power supplies, WAN (Internet) access, routers, firewalls, content filters and controls, Ethernet switches, storage, servers, and Wi-Fi access controllers. All of this is integrated at the Cannon Technologies factory with e-learning management software (LMS) – such as Moodle and Blackboard – along with all back-office systems, student security features like campus-wide access control, and CCTV recording for the school or college. Everything is fully integrated and tested before delivery to the school.

According to Mark Hirst, “While it’s possible to run Ethernet cabling throughout the school, with the prevalence of laptops, portable interactive whiteboards, and large-screen displays, moves, upgrades, and changes for a school are a potential nightmare. We tend to recommend using encrypted Wi-Fi throughout the school and playground, which eliminates most of the aforementioned drawbacks. Using Power over Ethernet (PoE) reduces the total cabling work for the entire school to a single main power supply cabinet and just 10 Ethernet cables to 10 Wi-Fi access points for a 300-user system, or only 40 cables for a 1,200-user campus.”.

Using systems like Moodle, teachers can now prepare their lessons and present information to their students in a wide variety of formats, from text and graphics to high-definition video. They also have to manage several processes and features that their predecessors were unfamiliar with, such as online forums, Twitter and other social media, as well as online progress tracking and assessment grading, all provided through the learning management software.

Perhaps surprisingly, IT-savvy students are even accessing e-learning from home or during their holidays and doing so at any time of day or night, leading to a demand for 24x7x365 availability via the web worldwide.

The result is that schools today require a sophisticated data center, much like a business does. The data center must provide powerful servers for processing and all the necessary infrastructure capacity to support these functions, while occupying minimal space and requiring minimal IT maintenance. Cannon Technologies' Mini Data Center range offers exactly what's needed to get started.

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