Infrastructure

The tools we use on a daily basis at Brewster Academy are powerful ones. Interactive databases help us track grade reports, attendance, student recognition, faculty professional development, and more. In the classroom, teachers develop their own electronic curriculum for students to view, interact with, download, and review at their own pace and needs. Throughout the day, our e-mail and conferencing intranet server and clients keep students, faculty, staff, and administrators communicating with each other at a high level. And through advanced filtering and time-based control mechanisms, we have access to the Internet and web available to our students and faculty at appropriate times in appropriate ways.

All of these functions require more than a computer – they require a local area network capable of supporting both our school needs and the needs we develop and grow into daily.

Brewster Academy took the initiative in Local Area Network and design. Our goal was and is for our computer resources to be ubiquitous to the learning experience. This requires a vast density of network ports and access points for our students and faculty to be able to reach those resources. With 3,000 Ethernet ports on campus (a ratio of ports to users of more than 7 to 1), Brewster has ensured that no matter where a student goes, she can find a place to plug her PowerBook in and use the school's resources at the level she needs. In a report on technology, Objective Communications (a videoconferencing and Video Server company) described Brewster Academy as "the most networked school on Earth."

To drive these thousands of ports, we have built a robust infrastructure and backplain. Using local New Hampshire technology leader Cabletron's Smartswitch 6000 as a core, we have the capacity to provide fully switched 10/100/1000 mbit Ethernet to every port on campus through a series of switches.

Our campus buildings are interconnected on the same Local Area Network through fiber optic cables capable of supporting thousands of simultaneous connections. Our server bay is served back to the Smartswitch 6000 through a gigabit channel, connecting 18 servers (distributing the load over several servers and allowing great control of access to information) to our school's population with unparalleled speed and service.