A year ago, Computerworld wrote an article about the use of internet bandwidth across NSW schools, following the roll out of student laptops - and the rapid growth in demand. Although it's a year old, it's worth a look if you're not familiar with the scale of the ICT within the NSW education system.

At the bottom of the article, almost as an afterthought, is a list of interesting statistics of the scale of ICT in New South Wales education. As I read the list, I thought about the parallels to business IT - and how big educational ICT is - such that it would make it a significant ICT business, anywhere in the world.

  • 1.3 million students — 500,000 K-12 students, 800,000 in further education
  • 96,000 employees, including 5500 IT staff
  • 500 support staff at schools for the Digital Education Revolution.
  • 2411 locations
  • 280,000 PCs,
  • 7000 physical servers on site at schools and TAFEs
  • 3500 virtual servers on site at schools and TAFEs
  • 1560 virtual servers in the DET’s two data centres
  • 800 physical servers in the DET’s two data centres
  • 280TB of storage space which doubles every year for last five years.
  • 96 per cent of DET schools are connected by fibre.

The bit that astounded me is that they have 280TB of storage space, and that's doubled every year for the last five years!

Learn MoreRead the original Computerworld article