User:Dfarning/Draft

School in a Box.

Education appliance.

This is our flagship product that was conceived to provide a comprehensive IT infrastructure in schools, rapidly and economically, and without the typical complexity that often accompanies such effort. The Critical Links Education Appliance is a complete (hardware and software) solution that essentially offers the following set of capabilities:

It enables the management of specific hardware (e.g. laptops etc) and provides all the networking required in a school It enables the management and distribution/deployment of software & content in a school. It provides a simplified way to manage student related data through a Student Information System (SIS) It also comes integrated with a Learning Management System (LMS), and a Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) to enable learning and collaboration activities

Education Appliance Product Offering

The Education Appliance is offered as a product that comprises of all the software and the underlying hardware, based on Intel Architecture (IA). Several models are offered as standard, based on different hardware specifications, engineered to support different size of deployments.The standardized offerings resulted from our assessment that these would substantially meet the requirements of schools across the world; these can scale from 60 simultaneous users to 1000 simultaneous users (and a total of 3000 student users). There is no inherent limitation in the Education Appliance software to scale beyond the 5 models noted below; appropriate hardware can be customized if necessary.

	EA 60	EA 100	EA 300	EA 500	EA 1000

Max. Number of Accounts 300 500 600 1000 3000 Max. Number of Simultaneous Users 60 100 300 500 1000 RAID No No No RAID 1 RAID 10 Redundant Power Supply No No No No Yes Form Factor Desktop Desktop Desktop 1U Rack 1U Rack

Why the Critical Links Education Appliance

1. Broadest feature functionality

The Education Appliance has the broadest range of features in one single platform. It instantaneously delivers all the 'school-IT-in-a-box', precluding the need for deploying several independent products, which add significant complexity and cost.

An important consideration is that the Education Appliance - despite offering such a wide range of sophisticated capabilities, makes these capabilities easily accessible without any significant training.

2. Wide applicability (Flexibility)

Different Environments - In IT labs and Classroom on Wheels (CoWs) to 1:1 e-Learning

The Education Appliance can - and is being used in a wide variety of school environments, ranging from schools just introducing IT in learning on a limited basis (e.g. labs etc) to a complete 1:1 environment.

The Education Appliance has a flexible virtualized software architecture which allows the deployment of 3rd party applications on the platform, to accommodate individual (school) preferences.

The set of capabilities in the Education Appliance can be introduced on a gradual basis and with time and familiarity, more sophisticated features can be made use of. This will protect the investment in the Education Appliance, and in fact, enables increases leverage over time.

With different levels of (Internet) Connectivity

The Education Appliance, especially its content distribution capability, is being used in schools with full broadband, without any access, and with limited or intermiitent connectivity. This is especially appealing in emerging countries wherein there is a need to deliver a uniformly consistent learning experience across a country or region (wherein typically connectivity is limited to a few urban areas).

3. Field Tested

The Education Appliance has been deployed successfully in thousands of schools around the world, from remote regions in Africa to urban centers in Europe. The Education Appliance has also been deployed in large scale, country-wide programs.

The Education Appliance is continually refined and updated to incorporate real life requirements from our vast experience in the field.

4. Significantly reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for Learning IT Infrastructure

The Education Appliance, by being able to manage hardware, software and content on a huge scale significantly reduces the cost of installation, operation and updates. Without a product like the Education Appliance. all these tasks become exponentially expensive due to the substantial effort that would be required to manage several products (each doing a subset of the functionality of the Education Appliance).

Large scale deployments of end user units (like laptops and tablets), as well as other equipment can also be managed by the Education Appliance, again reducing the complexity and cost of IT administration.

5. Backed by World-Class Partners and Ecosystem Critical Links actively partners with world leaders in education like Intel and Microsoft. Critical Links is also engaged with leaders in digitized content, interactive boards and other complementary solutions.

For further information about the Critical Links Education Appliance including the datasheet, please contact sales@critical-links.com