St. John’s Prep in Danvers, Massachusetts, has implemented ADTRAN’s virtual wireless LAN (vWLAN®) solution with ADTRAN’s Bluesocket® 1800 series 802.11n access points across its entire 175-acre campus, located 15 miles northeast of Boston. The deployment enables teachers and students to use the entire campus as a classroom with Wi-Fi enabled devices keeping everything connected.
Focused on creating an atmosphere that fosters intellectual growth, St. John’s Prep, a Xaverian Brothers-sponsored secondary school for young men, is dedicated to preparing all of its 1,200 students to take full advantage of today’s technology resources and encourages the use of Wi-Fi enabled devices in the curriculum. The faculty is also leveraging web-based technology in the teaching process, and the school has launched ongoing digital learning initiatives that require a scalable Wi-Fi infrastructure.
Given St. John’s Prep’s sprawling campus, centralized user control and software-based, virtualized device management residing on a hypervisor was a desirable feature. Rather than deploy a traditional hardware-based solution to operate its wireless network, vWLAN enables St. John’s Prep to leverage virtualization to eliminate the operational constraints and costs of physical hardware WLAN controllers. With the solution deployed, St. John’s Prep is able to create a private, secure cloud for the entire campus. Since vWLAN is software-based, scaling is simple and enables more access points to be added without an upgrade of a hardware WLAN controller. Even as wireless standards continue to evolve to the next generation of access points, including 802.11ac, no upgrades are needed with the virtual controller.
“We looked at other solutions, but all of them required additional hardware which added significant cost and operational burden to our IT staff’s resources. Since ADTRAN’s vWLAN solution is certified as VMware Ready, the installation of the vWLAN software on to our VMware instance was quick and effortless,” said Christopher Butler, director of information services at St. John’s Prep. “In the end, we achieved significant savings by avoiding all costs and bottlenecks associated with a hardware-based controller solution and gained a future-proof network with immense scalability to address growing demand on our network.”
