CACHEBOX conquers Tajiki peaks

ApplianSys is pleased to announce that the University of Central Asia, Tajikistan, has purchased a CACHEBOX solution to improve user experience and avoid a costly bandwidth upgrade.

The university has campuses in three countries – including one located in Khorog, a remote, mountainous region of Tajikistan. At this campus, limited bandwidth meant students suffered slow access to online education material in the classroom.

But bandwidth upgrades are prohibitively expensive in the remote region, so the university’s network manager, Ulanbek Sadybakasov, needed an alternative. That’s when he discovered the benefits of caching. By storing and serving web content locally, caching delivers content fast, typically at LAN speeds. In addition, bandwidth capacity is effectively multiplied – often by as much as 4 or 5 times.

Ulanbek considered setting up his own caching server: “I started to setup a Squid server, but the initial configuration was complicated, and I could see how time-consuming administration would be,” said Ulanbek. “CACHEBOX offered plug-and-play deployment and the user interface allowed me to analyse performance and manage the server in far less time.”

He compared products from several caching vendors, including Qwilt, Peer App, and Fortinet, but found that these weren’t well suited to his needs or limited budget.

Ulanbek found CACHEBOX to be the only easy to use, schools-focused caching appliance that offered models to suit his throughput requirement and his budget. Having seen the benefits in Khorog, the university quickly purchased a second CACHEBOX230 for its Naryn campus in Kyrgyzstan.

About UCA

UCA has campuses located in Khorog, Tajikistan, in Naryn, Kyrgyzstan, and in Tekeli, Kazakhstan. Built in 2015, UCA brings with it the commitment and partnership of the broader Aga Khan Development Network, offering an internationally recognised standard of higher education in Central Asia. His Highness, Prince Shah Karim Al Husseini, Aga Khan IV, is the Chancellor of the University.
Khorog is the capital and administrative centre of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO) in Eastern Tajikistan with a population of approximately 30,000 residents.