Dubai Men's College launches pioneering education infrastructure in ME

The announcement was made this morning in conjunction with the grand opening ceremony of DMC's campus held under the patronage of His Highness General Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and UAE Defense Minister and in the presence of His Excellency Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, UAE Minister of Education and Chancellor of the Higher Colleges of Technology.

The project, which kicked off a year ago in partnership with IBM Global Services (IGS), provides DMC's 2,000 students access to advanced educational technologies and helps position the college as an e-learning pioneer in the Gulf. The campus features some of the latest technologies that enable radical and new methods of learning, including online video lectures, online library archives, video conferencing, wireless connectivity and Voice over IP (VoIP).

"We had a two-fold goal in mind when we first started working with IBM. Firstly, we wanted to ensure that we were in a firm position to pioneer e-learning initiatives and provide our administration with a flexible and effectively integrated environment. Secondly, we saw the advanced infrastructure as a means of training our students to the latest technologies and building a national skills force that would lessen the country's dependency on imported expertise," said Bill Vega, director, Dubai Men's College. "Today, we are one step closer to accomplishing this two-fold goal. What we have achieved is truly remarkable."

The new campus infrastructure uses IBM's standards-based on demand model whereby the environment has inherent flexibility to change and bring in new technologies and adapt to changing requirements as and when required, not only now but also in the future. Students can benefit from a host of connectivity features, including secure wireless access throughout the campus, the region's first online facility that allows the video download of classroom lectures through video-on-demand technology. IBM also implemented Voice over IP (VoIP) for DMC's internal phone system, which provides added call management functionalities and sophisticated computer telephony integration (CTI).

"IBM works with many educational organisations around the world and we believe that the achievements by Dubai Men's College are significant and deserve a lot of credit not only at the regional level, but also in a global context," said Takreem El-Tohamy, general manager of IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan. "During the implementation stage, the students were allowed to shadow our trained technical consultants which greatly enhanced their exposure to real-life projects of this magnitude. We believe that this fulfills a need in the marketplace for fresh talented graduates with technical and project management experience in such sophisticated technologies which have been implemented in the DMC infrastructure."

IGS managed the complete migration and integration of this wide-scale turnkey project, with the assistance of its business partners. The make-up of DMC's modern IT backbone is supported by a Nortel-based networking environment and includes over 35 IBM eServer xSeries systems, a fully integrated enterprise management system using IBM's Tivoli enterprise software and Perigrine Helpdesk solution. On the storage side, the equipment includes an IBM TotalStorage Storage Area Network (SAN), an IBM Network Attached Storage Solution (NAS) system, an IBM TotalStorage UltraScalable Tape Library (LTO) and sophisticated IBM digital media technologies (developed at IBM's Technology Development Centre in Cairo) that incorporate an open and standards-based framework to digitally manage, store, protect and distribute video, audio and images across the DMC network.

DMC and IBM have built a high secure network for the campus that is not only safe from internal and external hackers but also provides features such as virus checking proxy appliances that ensure Web browsing is fast yet safe from Internet threats. "Security was a key issue for our new infrastructure. We wanted to ensure the new environment would be totally secure without impeding student access to appropriate resources and information files. This is why we used the resources of an IBM ethical hacker who was tasked with hacking the networking from within and externally and then share his knowledge via a workshop with DMC academics and students," continued Vega.

To help DMC students and faculty staff in this major transition to their new learning environment, IBM has set up an on-campus Network Help Desk which is manned by IBM-trained staff to provide year-round information to support the entire campus infrastructure on the different aspects of the networking system and address any questions they may have.