HP Enriches The Education Experience At Rajasthani Sammelan

Established in the year 1948, Rajasthani Sammelan is a social and charitable trust that has played a role in educating thousands of people, all over the country. For five decades and more, the trust has taken a leading role in promoting the facilities of education exclusively for girls/women.

Rajasthani Sammelan offers education facilities right from the pre-primary level to a post-graduation level, along with a few professional courses.

A high demand of educational resources has not only led to the rapid growth of the trust, but has increased its number of institutes and students over the years.

The IT Infra Of An Expanding Venture

Rajasthani Sammelan is a 12-storey educational campus that spreads over 190,000 square feet. Being a large educational campus, robust IT facilities throughout all its institutes were a must.

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Rajasthani Sammelan required a single central network, with its separate institutes linked to a common datacentre, while retaining separate virtual local area networks (VLANs). This network needed to be managed and administered from a central point for all institutes.

The trust wanted this network to not only support the new additional learning channels, but also wanted to involve departments like marketing, communication, security and administration.

For an educational institute that offers its students the opportunity to catch up with missed lectures over the Internet via live streaming, IT played a major role in building the institute-student relationship.

Ranjit Goraksha, General Manager of IT, Rajasthani Sammelan, said, “We use email to communicate with students and store all our student details on a single database. This required an IT solution that would provide the right features to support our students and staff.”

He added, “With the new IT infrastructure, we would also be able to use an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package to manage fees, tracking assets and staff information.”

Evaluating Prospective Partners

Rajasthani Sammelan carefully kept their needs in mind and determined the kind of requirements that they would need from their solution. Though the search for solutions began with the evaluation of three major technology vendors, the final responsibility was placed in the hands of HP.

Systems management for an institute as large as Rajasthani Sammelan, would be easier if a single vendor provided the entire infrastructure. The trust recognised this. Therefore, HP and the trust’s local partner, Xperts Information Technologies were chosen to develop the converged infrastructure solution.

Goraksha said, “The initial support and discussion with HP, and the time HP invested, was very satisfactory and better than those provided by other vendors. They not helped me decide which of their products would provide the optimum results, but also promised hardware repair or replacement within 24 hours if required.”

Support is provided by Xperts Information Technologies for the HP desktop PCs, and directly by HP servers, networking and storage. HP provides a lifetime warranty, which was another deciding factor.
“With all products from a single supplier, it’s easier to manage and add new capabilities in the future,” added Goraksha.

How HP Took On The Challenge

HP provided a converged infrastructure to meet the IT needs of the trust’s 600 staff and 15,000 students. Operating from an 800-square-foot datacentre, the solution replaces the existing multiple networks in which the departments and institutes had their own separate servers. Sixteen HP ProLiant BL460c blade servers are hosted in an HP Blade System c7000 Enclosure. The servers provide separate computing facilities for each of the nine institutes, but are connected so files can be shared. Storage is provided by an HP Network Attached Storage/Storage Area Network (NAS/SAN).

The networking for the new building is based on 37 HP Networking switches, including two HP core switches for redundancy. The network supports around 650 nodes, 200 Internet Protocol (IP) cameras used for CCTV to improve security of the building, and 50 wireless access points which allow staff and students to access the network conveniently.

The 12 floors are connected with a fibre backbone, and redundant Cat-6 cabling is used on each level. A distribution switch on each floor connects to the backbone. Goraksha comments, “We needed fast Internet, and that was provided by an HP Networking switch.”

The IP cameras provide video surveillance and connect via the network. All of the cameras and access controls are powered from HP switches that provide Power over Ethernet (PoE) on each floor, which means there is no need for separate power supplies. The PoE switches are backed up by an UPS. Institute also has a Generator as second level of fall back power.

An Enriched Education Experience

For Rajasthani Sammelan, good communication with its students and staffs, along with an enriching educational experience was a must. The new IT infrastructure provided by HP catered to these needs. It not only improved the education environment for the students, but also extended the trust’s channels of communication.

“The greatest benefit of the IT infrastructure is that communications have improved so much,” said Goraksha. “Everyone is aware of what is happening – new facilities, guest lecturers or new books in the library – and the response from students, across the board, is that they find this very helpful.”
HP also helped the trust consolidate and organise all their data and educational material with their storage solution. This data, along with various subscribed online journals and magazines are provided to the students and staff via the IT network.

The teaching experience has also improved due to the HP infrastructure. Each institute now has an interactive ‘smart board’ and through the central server, this can be used to show video and audio to students.

With a single student database, repetition of work such as entering students’ details has been reduced, saving time. There is also less scope for mistakes, for example spelling a student’s name or address incorrectly. “To keep track of students’ attendance and staff manually or on non-networked computers is difficult, so we use HP networking to connect everything, saving time with an automated bio metric attendance system,” commented Goraksha.

The ERP system provides more control over accounts and purchasing, saving money for the trust, and improves efficiency by helping managers in their decision-making – for example by showing them best practice from past decisions.

Rajasthani Sammelan prides on differentiating itself from other educational institutions by trying not to teach students, but to help them learn. The IT system plays a key role in helping them achieve this by making all information accessible to a student, and by being available to all students and staff 24x7.