TVTC Innovates eLearning with FusionAccess

TVTC Innovates eLearning with FusionAccess

"One of the essential objectives for TVTC is to promote educational plans and make the best use of innovative technologies. Huawei's work helps us with this object, by building a new platform. We are enabled to promote a series of educational projects and prepare our students for the future."

                                                                                            --- TVTC manager, Doctor Ali bin Nasser Al-Ghafis

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Introduction

Technical and Vocational Training Corporation (TVTC), in Saudi Arabia, is a government institute for vocational education and training — the largest training facility in the Middle East — in charge of educational training projects for Saudi Arabian branch offices all over the Kingdom. It has 142 affiliated technical colleges, 250 training labs, 65 training centers, and more than 50,000 students and has an essential objective to promote educational plans and make the best use of innovative technologies.

Challenges

Over the years, TVTC had invested heavily in networked multimedia interactive teaching, teaching over networks, and on-demand learning, using PCs as the training terminals. However, many of their PCs were outdated, causing serious service interruption during multimedia teaching, and suffered from the following disadvantages:
With no effective management in place, risks are run of data being stolen through a variety of ports and vulnerability to viruses could cause deteriorated performance and potential breakdowns that would seriously impact teaching activities.
Delivering teaching materials to PC terminals in training institutes all over the country was becoming difficult because of the increased volume of data being shared on traditional file servers.
With PC hardware scattered across locations, centralized PC management was not easy. The routine O&M workload of upgrading and patching anti-virus software, applications, and operating systems was heavy. In addition, different types of PC hardware and varied user requirements for desktop environments made PC desktop standardization more difficult.
To resolve these problems, TVTC considered the feasibility of the Huawei FusionAccess Desktop Cloud Solution to replace the traditional PCs. As the desktop cloud technology uses a server system to carry desktop images, resources could easily be centralized to improve desktop and infrastructure management.

In consideration of the great number of branch offices and students all over the country, the TVTC determined it required the following:

  • Support for HD video broadcasting
  • Delivery of distance learning with online audio and video interaction
  • A system for unified and centralized O&M — pushing courseware, patches, and upgrades to teaching terminals

Solution

During the evaluation process with major desktop cloud manufacturers, Huawei FusionAccess Desktop Cloud Solution was favored. After the first phase of the pilot project for about 600 Virtual Machines (VMs), Huawei FusionAccess Desktop Cloud Solution deployed Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs) in four TVTC colleges, resolving problems caused by the traditional PCs, and fulfilling TVTC’s requirements. Despite fierce competition during the second phase of the project, Huawei devices were chosen and deployed — the 13,200 VMs covered all branch offices and elevated TVTC’s system to being the largest educational desktop cloud in the world.

Huawei FusionAccess Desktop Cloud Solution includes servers, access switches, storage devices, virtualization software, desktop cloud software, and cloud terminals. The overall solution delivery features high compatibility, high performance, high reliability, and provision of professional maintenance teams. Details include:

  • Providing an end-to-end security solution covering terminal access, user rights authentication, user behavior audits, encrypted data transmission, content encryption, and rights management. Data is stored only in the back-end data center, not the front-end office terminals (terminals have no hard disks), to ensure the data security.
  • Huawei CT5000 was deployed as the desktop cloud terminal, using HD video thin client code and an AMD Fusion platform design. It is an energy-efficient product with a total power consumption of less than 10W, operates with WES7 as the basic operating system, and is fully compatible with HDP and ICA virtualization applications.
  • The unified O&M platform, with its centralized management of VMs, provides a rich set of functions, including co-ordinated courseware delivery and centralized upgrades of Windows desktops and application software. The desktop cloud achieves a ten-fold increase in O&M efficiency when compared to the old PC system.

Benefits

Following deployment of the Huawei FusionAccess Desktop Solution, TVTC immediately experienced these benefits:
  • A fully meshed system that protects against illegal access by removal of local hard disks so terminals no longer store data — all data is stored in the cloud data center. By default, the write function of USB ports is disabled, read and write policies are now controlled by the desktop cloud management system FusionManager.
  • TVTC now promotes educational plans easily with this innovative new platform. With the solution and its one-click push, teaching materials are centrally deployed to terminals so students can immediately view the materials required for the day’s courses.
  • Users enjoy a faster, better OA experience and, with the DVI-I interfaces of the CT5000 supporting dual displays, they can smoothly view YouTube videos using 60-inch HD LCDs.
  • New educating methods can be applied such as high-definition online teaching, interactivity, and on-demand training videos.
  • The unified O&M platform provides quick service provisioning and comprehensive centralized management of the system, improving O&M efficiency by more than ten times.

TVTC, now with the world’s largest cloud-based eLearning system, offers a broader series of educational projects to prepare its students for the future.