Curro’s virtualised datacentre helps traverse clouds, geographies and education mediums
Future educators are today grappling with how to deliver education solutions that support the changing demands of learners, in light of the current COVID-19 health pandemic, the need for digital solutions has escalated at a rapid rate. Leveraging the power of technology, the independent school group, Curro Holdings, has partnered with First Technology in the Western Cape and VMware to transform its technology infrastructure, enabling it to deliver a truly digital education experience across geographies, endpoints, learners, parents and educators.
Established in 1998, Curro is South Africa’s largest independent education provider, with over 178 schools across 70 sites, serving learners from three months to Grade 12. This bold technology move has helped power its desire to provide reliable education anywhere and offer learners working remotely access to the same platforms they have at school bridging the gap between traditional schooling and various forms of remote schooling.
Creating future-based education solutions
According to Riaan Vlok, Head of IT at Curro Holdings, the real test on educators is using technology to bring the curriculum to life in a digitally centred world. Curro pioneered the use of digital textbooks or “ink behind glass” in South Africa early on. This digital transformation has now evolved, requiring a media and content-rich educational experience that teachers, learners and parents are used to in other areas of digital life.
“In Africa, many are battling with the transition from traditional learning methods to a digital learning experience due to limited digital exposure. Digital-led education is changing the way learning is delivered across the world mainly because of the high Digital Intelligence Quotient (DQ) that exists in developed markets. At Curro, we deliver education centred around the learner, and our systems must support this insight-driven educational experience enabling learners to absorb learning better wherever they are.
“We are creating the most comprehensive educational technology platform available today. It must serve school administrators, teachers, parents and learners through an innovative digitally integrated experience,” he adds
Education that is always-on
Curro’s technology landscape is made up of a centralised datacentre, on-site datacentres, and an intricate network fabric that needs to cater for over 60 000 endpoints and supports 11 terabytes of traffic a day. Unlike other school (K-12) technology ecosystems, Curro’s is centralised, integrating all business and educational systems including cybersecurity, educational platforms and business systems.
Partnering with First Technology Western Cape, a VMware reseller and systems integrator, the company has deployed a virtual data centre using VMware VSAN, VMware vSphere, and all the sub-services within VSAN. This allows for sharing, movement and collaboration between schools of teachers, learners and learning resources and leverages its existing hardware environment while supporting its hybrid cloud.
“Investment into digital transformation gets stuck at the point of technology execution because of infrastructure costs. Our virtualised VMware datacentre lets us marry our physical assets to the physical application and centrally manage them while adding a cloud fabric where it makes sense. In short, we can digitally transform and leverage the benefits of the cloud without expecting users to change the way they work,” says Vlok.
With VSAN, the company is less hardware-dependant and turned its traditional, often idle infrastructure, into a high availability data centre able to perform disaster recovery more effectively. Vlok says he is now able to significantly improve the management of the demand-driven technology requirement by “bursting and shrinking” cloud capacity from his cloud service providers.
Bridging the digital education divide
By virtualising a large proportion of its services, Curro is more agile and can write applications in containers. An active-active recovery environment versus a traditional active-passive one means fewer capacity issues, particularly around “reporting and marking” season, when the system undergoes immense pressure three times a year as educators need to upload, cross-check and share information regularly.
“We have seen a massive increase in our ability to scale and prioritise workloads, right down to a code and development level. We are planning to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) with our VMware solution to help us dynamically allocate infrastructure and resources. Looking ahead we want to use behavioural AI to help prioritise IT services as well as map our responses to events,” he says.
“Curro is an excellent example of a learning institution that understands the modern learners needs. By adapting to the times and embracing new technologies as a tool to modernise its approach to education, its clients which are its learners are the true beneficiaries,” ends Gerhard Horn, Datacentre Architect at First Technology, Western Cape.