• Home
• GOVERNMENT CXO
• E-GOVERNMENT
• CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT
• TAX AND REVENUE MANAGEMENT
• GOVERNMENT PROCUREMENT
• GREEN GOVERNMENT
• GOVERNMENT DATA MANAGEMENT
• GOVERNMENT SECURITY
• GOVERNMENT CLOUD
• GOVERNMENT ANALYTICS
• GOVERNMENT GIS
• CONNECTED GOVERNMENT
• DIGITAL INCLUSION
• EDUCATION IT
• HEALTHCARE IT

Education IT

Polytechnic in Singapore to deploy campus-wide virtualisation

By Xinghui Guo | 29 November 2011

To enable learning beyond the classroom, Temasek Polytechnic (TP), a tertiary institute with 15,000 students, is deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure from a single unified computing system.

This means that all of TP’s software will be hosted on servers and available to students through any device and from anywhere. While currently available (since August 2011) to only 600 students from the School of Informatics and IT in a pilot, TP hopes to have this environment deployed to the entire school in three years, said Mandy Mak, Deputy Director, Technology and Academic Computing, TP.

Full deployment might take three years but the planning alone for this deployment took TP two years, said Mak, while implementation took about six months.

“We had a lot of planning considerations,” shared Joseph Lim, Section Head, Infrastructure Systems and Technology, TP. “We wanted to consolidate our scattered hardware and reduce the amount of manpower needed to operate them. It also took time to get buy-in, although we have been 80 per cent successful in converting our staff.”

From this virtualisation, TP expects to increase the availability of software to its students and make scheduling computer laboratory timetables a less tedious affair for staff. Lim also expects to see manpower savings, especially on time spent on preparing lessons.

To introduce this virtualised environment, TP is working with Cisco.

Tweet

---