Welcome to CachePilot - Beyond the Becta Spec

Beyond the Becta Specification for Caches

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Becta - who are they ?
A government funded agency - British Educational Communications and technology Agency.

Becta - what do they do ?
In their own words : "We are the Government's key partner in the development and delivery of its Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and e-learning strategy for schools and the learning and skills sector. We support all four UK education departments in their strategic ICT developments, facilitating knowledge transfer among them."

Amongst many other things they provide advice and guidance to educational bodies on networking technologies such as caching, broadband, content delivery etc.

What is the Becta Specification for Caches ?
The authors' aims are "helping provide a specification for caching equipment and discussing issues concerning delivery of media-rich content and use of Internet via broadband".

The document is not presented in the form of a simple checklist so it does require some understanding of the technology area it is discussing in order to fully comprehend some of the more detailed issues.

Some of the key Becta Specification items (that of course Equiinet CachePilot adheres to) are:

Enabling 'Pre-loading' of content.
Increase performance of Internet connectivity using 'reactive caching'.
Provide monitoring, management and reporting features.
Hard disk storage must be a minimum of 70GBytes.
WAN based preloading defined by DfES/Becta manifest lists.
Allow schools to incorporate their own content.
Provide Media Streaming - including caching and splitting.
Headless operation - i.e. the unit is an appliance not a PC needing monitor and keyboard.
Provide centralised mechanisms to distribute and activate software upgrades.
Be capable of being remotely managed.
Integrate with Industry standard access control systems systems such as LDAP
Must not inhibit or impair use of Access control systems, filtering services, firewall security or virus scanning tools.

What are some of the other issues that the specification does not cover?
From our experience in providing many thousands of CachePilots into schools some of the key issues that should be considered in making a selection on Caching devices are:

Content: Which e-learning content are you interested in ? Does the caching device you are considering support all the leading content suppliers' offerings?
To see more our Content partners : Click here !
CDN: the Becta Specification briefly talks about Content Delivery Networks but does not make any detailed recommendations. Equiinet have partnered with Cisco to implement sophisticated CDN technology and capabilities.
Performance: Can the architecture of the cache actually cope with your current and future workloads ? What happens when all 200 of your PCs are accessing the cache at the same time ?
To see a detailed performance review on CachePilot : Click here !
Disk Capacity and Resilience : CachePilot provides nearly double the minimum disk storage space recommended, but we can provide that double that figure again - and provide automatic disk mirroring which constantly ensures you have a backup disk should the primary fail.
Speeds and Feeds: Do you need Gigabit Ethernet on your LAN if your pupils are view large amounts of video content? Do you need more that one LAN interface ? Can your cache support a 100Mbps Internet WAN feed - not just today's popular 10Mbps or 2Mbps feeds ? The CachePilot Enterprise has 2 Gigabit Ethernet Interfaces and a separate 10/100 interface as standard.
To see more details on CachePilot Enterprise : Click here !
Filtering and access controls: The specification talks about 'not inhibiting' these facilities- but the real issue is 'implementing' filtering and access controls on the cache itself for individual school security and control. Most of the CachePilot installed base of thousands of units is already using sophisticated filtering systems and access controls implemented on the CachePilot.
Remembering ISDN: The Becta Spec is very very broadband centric. What about rural schools will never have broadband and need ISDN connectivity. CachePilot has fully integrated ISDN interfaces on board for those schools that need this connectivity - coupled with timebands to ensure usage does not stray into costly tariffs outside the 08:00 to 18:00 periods.
Network Resilience: How can you configure your netork so the cache is not a 'single point of failure' - so if the cache goes down you lose all access to Internet and local content ? By using WCCP or WPAD transparent fault tolerant configurations can be deployed with CachePilot..
Security: Just because there is a firewall between the LEA wide network infrastructure and the outside world - this means nothing in segregating one school from another. An onboard firewall on your cache could keep your school safe from potential hackers within this network. CachePilot has had a firewall incorporated from day one !