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Avnet Games Winners Showcase Tech Prowess

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 04/27/09

The Avnet Tech Games are over, and nine of the 57 student teams that entered from Arizona colleges and universities have won scholarships for proving their abilities to work through real-life technology challenges. Nearly 200 students vied for top honors in Avnet's fourth-annual competition, which is composed of nine separate events. Among the challenges, students showcased how to use technology to address a humanitarian need, create a solar-powered lamp, and construct a virtual server environment.

A panel of judges made up of executives from technology firms, engineers, and technical experts selected the winners based on their ability to meet the technical requirements of the task, apply innovative approaches to the solution, and demonstrate professional skills.

Among the winners, Mesa Community College dominated the Premise One "Networking within the Enterprise" game, in which teams compete to connect, configure and effectively secure a computer network in support of a fictitious company's business demands including surveillance, paging, e-mail, IP phones, and Web requirements.

University of Advancing Technology won Belkin's "Patch Panel Madness," where teams build a working data network using a provided network diagram, cabling, patch panels, switches and racks.

Arizona State University, W.P. Carey School of Business prevailed in the VMware "Virtualization Challenge," in which teams are given three unique physical enterprise computer platform scenarios with the goal of producing a three to five year roadmap maximizing their business value while factoring in proper ROI and architectures with consideration for the current virtualization trends.

Next year's tech games take place on April 10 at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, AZ.