A international residential school wanted an integrated, future proof infrastructure that would enable IT staff to provide students and teachers with a robust platform for providing excellence in education. Their existing network infrastructure was proving to be a pain area, and was hindering the easy access of network resources. Acquisition of software licenses also was proving to be very expensive, and the school was unable to keep pace with the rapid upgrade cycle required to keep up with changing IT trends.

Academic institutions are increasingly aware of the need for a scalable IT infrastructure, as education needs get more complex. More and more education content is being made available in electronic form, as well as being confined to PCs. Quadra proposed an integrated directory services, database and email solution, that drastically brought down the system administration effort, as well as providing seamless access to network resources. The migration process was transparent, without causing disruption to end users. Students were provided with individual user accounts, and file storage, as well as email accounts. Printing was made centralized, and expensive printing resources could now be monitored more effectively. Earlier, students used their own free email accounts, but with the features made available, the school email system was more compelling. The integrated infrastructure also made backup easy and painless, thereby providing insurance against data loss and corruption. The investment made by the school was now future proof, as well as providing enhanced stability, reliability and security. The software licenses required for the entire solution was provided under a blanket licensing agreement, which reduced administrative costs in managing and distributing software licenses. The school now had a fixed annual outflow which enabled.

One of the leading engineering colleges in South India wanted an low cost, secure and stable computing portal for its student community. The college was saddled with disparate systems that was unable to provide a unified view of its computing resources to its students.

At the heart of the solution was a scalable directory service that provided accurate user identity information to maintain accurate faculty, student and staff information, while eliminating manual work associated with provisioning users. Single sign on facility was also enabled to provide single step access to resources. This enabled the IT staff to automatically create user accounts and to use the associated file system to provision home directories and required storage space. Instead of each department acting as a separate island, the college now has a single management view of IT, enabling it to improve collaboration across disciplines. Additionally, to provide the highest level of reliability and availability, cluster services were set up. This would eliminate downtime and allow the IT staff to carry out maintenance work without any user disruption. The storage solution also allowed users access to their files from campus, or from outside the network, by using a Web browser, which enabled automatic synchronization of files with their desktop and the server anytime an Internet connection was present. This enabled effective utilization of IT resources, and increase staff and student productivity.