BEST DEPLOYMENT: A Modern Temple of Learning

The Client

Visvesvaraya Technological University
(VTU) is one of the biggest Technological University in India, having
186 colleges affiliated to it with under graduate course in 28
disciplines and PG Programme in 71 disciplines. The intake at UG
level is about 67100 students and at the PG level it is about 12666
students. The University has 13 QIP centre in various affiliated
colleges and 16 extension centres for offering PG programmes. There
are over 2305departments recognized as research centres.

Client Requirements

VTU was looking out for a solution,
which would help its students use on-demand lectures using content
provided by National Programme for Technical Enhanced Learning
(NPTEL). This requirement meant to deploy advanced state-of-the-art
technology, the on-demand video streaming and community learning
using the latest Web 2.0 technologies.

Solution Provider : Locuz Enterprise
Solutions

Once the client was briefed about how
the entire solution would be deployed and the cost involved in this
project was finalized, VTU designated Locuz Enterprise Solutions to
manage the content management software, which was based on
open-source platform and provided 'anytime anywhere learning
environment' to students of VTU and its affiliated colleges. The
service provider (SP) realized quickly the entire consumer
requirement and how to address them within the timeframe of the
project rollout.

The Solution

The entire project was valued at
approximately half a million rupees and called for deployment of
hardware. Sun Microsystems was assigned the job role to arrange for
hardware and TISRA for the content management software.

The work started two-and-half-years ago
taking one year to design the specifications required for VTU. “With
the help of Sun Microsystems and e-learning platform support from
TISRA, we evolved a unique advanced e-learning deployment solution
called e-vidya. The e-vidya solution meets the requirements of
students by providing them the NPTEL media content, VTU media
content, and advanced Web 2.0 content management solution,” said
Mohd Arifuddin, AVP-Sales, Locuz Enterprise Solutions.

The entire hardware architecture
required state-of-art, CMT-based servers from Sun Microsystems and
high-capacity, high-performance storage systems for content
repository. Deployment of the solution was done over LAN and WAN in
60 colleges. After the deployment, the major task was to provide
training to the faculty about the solutions. “Our existing
relationship with VTU helped us bag this interesting and challenging
project,” Arifuddin added.

Considered to be the brainchild of VTU,
Dr TN Nagabhushan, who is now the Head of Information, Science and
Engineering at Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering said,
“The bandwidth limit of videos posted on Youtube, posed a major
problem for college students to watch videos.” This led to the
birth of video content management system, which is an indexed
collection of all the videos. Now the students can search courses by
the branch, engineering year they are studying in, and the professor
whose lecture they want to view. With just three of four courses, the
programme was first installed in MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology,
Bengaluru, along with the hardware platform support from Sun
Microsystems and the content management software from TISRA.

The Sunsparc server was provided
free to colleges. It was an advantage for any college with a 1GB
backbone network, a 1GB switch and desktops with 1GB RAM. As the
server was a high-performance streaming server, about 500 users could
watch the videos concurrently.

The Result

Satisfied with the implementation of
the Sun P5120 streaming server and six terabyte storage systems, VTU
is now at par with the rest of the universities across the world as
it is primarily focused on the necessity to have an open-source
platform and the indigenous deployment of the video content. "This
network will meet the computing demand of post graduate students in
the campus, provide e-learning environment, access to digital
library, support examination, administration work and more
importantly have sufficient bandwidth for videoconferencing,from any
network access point,” added Nagabhushan.

The project is now implemented in 60
colleges of the state. The high-quality video e-learning material was
required to be distributed to all undergraduate engineering students
in the country, which was recorded by IIT and IISc professors under
NPTEL. Initially, students faced problem of sharing videos as there
was only nine terabytes to accommodate all courses, with storage
space posing as the biggest problem.

Project driven by: Avishek Rakshit