Westminster is a leading independent coeducational day and boarding school providing an exceptional education for boys and girls from Early Learning to Year 12. Established in 1961 with a desire to give students every opportunity to ‘achieve more than they thought was possible’, this mission flows through everything they do including the classroom, community, sport and in their technology.
Westminster has superb facilities set on 23 hectares and offers more than 40 subject choices in Year 12, around 200 sporting teams, activity clubs and ensembles, outstanding wellbeing programs, and teachers who are leaders in their field.
Westminster’s Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) team, is responsible for all communication technologies, including the internet, wireless networks, phones, computers, software, video-conferencing, social networking, and other media applications and services. As such they strive to provide the best technology to support educational outcomes and enable everyone in the organisation to thrive.
To that end, they determined a need for high speed, diverse and stable connections and began partnering with SABRENet a decade ago as an infrastructure partner that enables their school to diversely connect their community locally and globally. Head of ICT, Chris Mclean says, “We look forward to the decade ahead and what we will continue to achieve together.”
In 2021 Westminster’s ICT team redesigned the schools Infrastructure and architecture in a significant project. This work was completed in very tight time frame and required precision from all vendors. SABRENet worked closely with AARNet and the ICT team to ensure they experienced zero downtime for stakeholders. This cohesive approach from SABRENet ensured that the project was very successful.
The SABRENet partnership has shown a long-term benefit to Westminster school. They have the flexibility they need to ‘think big’, to dream and to improve their systems. They currently have two local datacentres on site at the school and use multiple cloud resources for redundancy and disaster recovery (DR).
The pandemic as well as forward thinking, has spurred the desire and need for Hybrid Learning. The educational model where some students attend class in-person, while others join the class virtually from home, has required a fast and reliable internet connection. Educators teach remote and in-person students at the same time using tools like Microsoft Teams and Digital Delivery Labs.
“We are a very lucky school in that our property is split over two separate power grids. This enables our two on-premise datacentres to provide a very high level of availability. The diversity SABRENet provides only further bolsters and supports that. With diverse 10Gb links we know that Hybrid Learning isn’t just possible, it’s seamless and simple,” says Chris Mclean.
With the move to Hybrid Cloud happening in tandem with Hybrid Work and Hybrid Learning, Chris says, “We are positioned well to navigate new territory with less fear of infrastructure causing roadblocks. With Cloud DR and redundancy, we will soon be able to seamlessly move workloads between on-premise infrastructure and Azure. SABRENet continues to allow us to innovate in this space. We thank SABRENet for their partnership and enabling us to have great success as we endeavour on the greatest journey of all with our students – Providing exceptional education and the promise of achieving more than they thought possible!”
