Huntsville City Schools

Transcription

1 Huntsville City Schools Digital Initiative

2 TekLinks and Partners Build New Infrastructure for Huntsville City Schools Huntsville, AL, School District unifies domain infrastructure and builds out new network with TekLinks, Inc. and its partners Cisco, VMware, EMC, and Microsoft. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY HUNTSVILLE CITY SCHOOLS Education, Pre-K to 12th Grade Huntsville, AL, USA Approx. 2,850 Employees BUSINESS CHALLENGE Needed new core infrastructure for standardization of communication Needed higher availability for system (with backup) and more efficient file sharing capabilities Needed wireless capability in all schools Needed to meet 1-to-1 initiative to provide devices loaded with digital curriculum to each student NETWORK, STORAGE, AND VIRTUALIZATION SOLUTIONS Rebuilt the current network foundation with Cisco servers and VMware ESX virtual servers Consolidated 45 separate domains into one, installed 2010 MS Exchange, and set up MS Sharepoint for all users Installed fiber channel SAN with EMC s unified storage system and established WAN Deployed Cisco wireless network with 2000 access points and 45 controllers, and built out an on-site Call Center with Cisco telephony capabilities Imaged and distributed 23,000+ devices (ipads, Netbooks, and HP and Dell laptops) BUSINESS RESULTS A new WAN connects 52 different facilities for seamless communication and high-speed wireless internet access. Teachers and administration benefit from the availability of improved and file-sharing systems. Students are more engaged with the new digital curriculum, which can be updated remotely on a daily basis. Cost of education software is more affordable, scalable, and updatable than the cost of traditional textbooks. Page 1

3 Business Challenge When Huntsville City Schools Superintendent Dr. Casey Wardynski announced early in 2012 that he wanted to instate his digital 1-to-1 initiative throughout the district by the beginning of the school year, he knew that partnering up with the right IT solutions provider was crucial. The school district of Huntsville, AL, serves a community of over 23,000 students and their parents. Employing roughly 1,700 teachers, the district oversees 52 facilities including 22 elementary schools, 9 middle schools, two K-8 schools, 7 high schools, 3 special education centers, and 4 magnet schools. Since Dr. Wardynski accepted the position in June 2011, he had been helping the school system recover from a significant budget deficit. With the finances back on track, Dr. Wardynski turned to the significant costs that textbooks incur every year and quickly decided to ask TekLinks to help move Huntsville s classrooms into the 21st century by setting up the system and devices needed to deliver the digital curriculum. Because simply throwing more money at the education system has proved ineffective, I wanted to adopt a more conceptual approach to close the gap and, based on what businesses today have learned, technology is the answer, explains Dr. Wardynski. Prior to this initiative, the district was operating off of donated hardware and outdated software. Our technology was so stunted that we had very limited file sharing capabilities and absolutely no redundancy within the network. Remote access to for teachers and staff was impossible. To prepare for this massive undertaking, Dr. Wardynski contracted IT Director Laquita Nelson, and they engaged representatives from TekLinks local office there in Huntsville. Corporate Account Manager for TekLinks, Jim Griffith, immediately recognized the critical nature of their work. In terms of the complexity of the project, we felt that this is a unique, one-of-a-kind solution that, if executed properly, could be reproduced on a national level. To take the network they had and completely rebuild it so that it would provide the kind of bandwidth needed to deliver digital curriculum to every student at every school we knew that would require a significant foundation of networking, virtualization, and storage. So we partnered with industry leaders Cisco, VMware, and EMC to find the best answers to their IT needs. Page 2 Prior to this initiative, the district was operating off of donated hardware and outdated software. Our technology was so stunted that we had very limited file sharing capabilities and absolutely no redundancy within the network. Dr. Casey Wardynski, Superintendent, Huntsville City Schools

4 Network, Storage, and Virtualization Solutions TekLinks Senior Systems Engineers Les Moore (Cisco) and Chad Sanders (Microsoft, Storage & Virtualization) met with Griffith and Nelson to discuss what needed to be done in order to bring the ambitious 1:1 digital initiative to fruition in less than a year s time. They decided that a hybrid solution involving on-premise hardware as well as TekLinks managed services offerings would be the most efficient route to follow. While much of the planning and strategy for implementation occurred during the first part of 2012, little could be done until the students were out of school for summer break. When we analyzed our system and network, we discovered that we need to revamp everything we needed a new WAN and LAN, we need to upgrade our software We took Huntsville City Schools from using your average consumer technologies to having a network with enterpriselevel capabilities. Moore agreed that the project was both exciting and difficult given the bulk of work to be done: What we were doing here was wiping the slate entirely clean and starting fresh. As an engineer, it s a very unique opportunity to be allowed to build a whole new system from the ground up. I was thrilled to be a part of such a huge culture change for the schools. Moore also commented on the project s accelerated completion time, which reduced an ideal four-year deployment into one: We knew that when you build something this big and this complicated, in this short amount of time, there are bound to be problems. however, we also knew that we were up to the task, and with a lot of determination and long hours, we would be able to do it. Once the summer term began, the TekLinks team, led by Moore and Sanders, started an intense three-month implementation process to set up a brand new Cisco network infrastructure with enterprise-class switches supporting PoE and Gb speeds in order to replace a mixture of donated and pre-used consumer level networking equipment. They installed (and configured) 40 on-premise Cisco UCS C210 servers and AP switches, nearly 2000 access points, and an EMC VNX5100 fiber channel SAN for storage. This required working with other vendors to run cabling, hang the access points, and upgrade power outlets where needed. The TekLinks team also discovered that many of the schools network closets were nothing more than a shelf in a broom closet, or (at best) old racks that could not possibly hold the new equipment. The engineers worked around summer school activities, stayed long into the night, and returned on the weekends to supply the schools with true Page 3 - Chad Sanders, Senior Systems Engineer, TekLinks

5 Network, Storage, and Virtualization Solutions (cont.) network cabinets and racks with cable management, relocate or rerun network drops, and install countless new patch cables to connect everything back to the new switches. We knew that, with the 1:1 initiative, the network had become as critical as it could get, so we integrated redundancy and dual-paths wherever possible. The reliability we wanted to ensure for them goes all the way down to putting new uninterruptable power supplies on every piece of equipment, so that we can then monitor the battery conditions from our Operations Center, explains Moore. Located in the school district s Central Office, the Operations Center now allows continuous proactive 24/7 monitoring of all aspects of the network, which is based upon Cisco Prime and SolarWinds Orion products. Prior to this comprehensive network management solution, if an outage occurred, the IT team would not find out about it until, for example, the security office notified them that they could no longer access their cameras on campus. Today, we get automatic alerts whenever anything occurs within the network and can usually have it repaired before anyone even notices there was a problem. Now we know exactly where or what the problem is, how to fix it, and how long it will take to resolve. The ability to communicate this information instantly to the user gives the Huntsville schools IT department a whole new level of credibility, concludes Moore. For the schools system, they used VMware Quest to begin an AD migration for their transition from an obsolete POP3 mail system qmail to a 2010 Microsoft Exchange environment, and they also set up Microsoft SharePoint for their faculty portal needs. To do this, Senior Systems Engineer Chad Sanders manually input the end user data to execute a cross-forest migration of 45 different domains into a single one. With 86 MS domain controllers (approximately 3 servers at each location), Sanders and his team installed VMware ESX to host the VMs running the student body domain and the faculty domain. Without VMware ESX, this domain consolidation would have been incredibly costly, says Sanders. With these VMs, he was also able to design an anti-hacker infrastructure that allowed for a 1-way trust between the two domains for added security: while student accounts were always accessible from the faculty domain, the faculty domain could not be affected by actions originating from the student domain. Previously, the school merely kept a hosted system at the ISP with very little ability to customize security to each school s individual needs. TekLinks was able to upgrade that to a more efficient system of content Page 4

6 Network, Storage, and Virtualization Solutions (cont.) filtering by using EdgeWave iprism web filtering technology, which gave the district full control over the students access to the Internet, both at school and at home, through cloud-based remote filtering. Once we had the main domain controllers installed at the school system s central office, we could then expand their range of IP addresses from Class A to Class C, says Sanders. Les [Moore] was able to carve out their new ranges, and then we established a VPN connection to [TekLinks ] data center in Birmingham in order to finish the collocation setup. This process involved adding dual/redundant Cisco ASA firewalls and corresponding VPN capabilities to provide greater reliability and increase their throughput. As Sanders aptly sums it up: Basically, we took Huntsville City Schools from using your average consumer technologies to having a network with enterpriselevel capabilities. The top-of-the-line capabilities of the schools new core network also emerged out of the Managed Services solutions that TekLinks recommended for dedicated , increased connectivity, and quality telecommunication. For their environment, TekEx provided hosted Exchange out of the cloud. For their internet connection, TekConnect established an MPLS network consisting of 36 metro-ethernet links dispersed among the school facilities and (2) 1G host ports located at the central office. TekLinks Director of Telecom Services, Donny McCarty, guided the team as they upgraded the existing single 100Mb connection to dual 300Mb connections for better performance and resiliency. Under his direction, the team ensured that the schools network could support 300Mb of internet access with a 100 Mb throughput connecting the Huntsville cloud environment to the data center in Birmingham. For their high-traffic telephony needs, McCarty also oversaw the installation of TekVoice s hosted PBX call center solution, which runs a virtualized call center for the school system out of their cloud. For Huntsville s Free and Reduced Lunch Program providing students daily meals, the TekLinks Managed Services Team set up a hosted page for parents to submit their forms online simply and efficiently through TekCloud. Providing the necessary bandwidth within the timeframe allotted was certainly a challenge, a challenge we were ready for, says McCarty. With the help of the Huntsville City School IT department, we were able to deploy a state-of-the-art Wide Area Network providing the school system with what has become the backbone of the digital initiative. The deployment was smooth with all connectivity tested, up and operational within the given time lines. Page 5

7 Network, Storage, and Virtualization Solutions (cont.) In addition to the network build-out and the managed and hosted solutions, TekLinks was able to provide Huntsville City Schools with the manpower and long hours needed to have the students devices ready to deploy by the first day of school on August 20th, When Sanders discovered that the school district was about to pursue a much more expensive deployment process than necessary, Sanders decided he and his engineers could more efficiently load the proper software to each of the students devices - roughly 17,000 laptops and about 6,000 ipads and Netbooks. We realized the 3rd party hired for the device deployment was following an imaging procedure that was incredibly expensive and time-consuming, says Sanders. So we decided to take ownership of the imaging ourselves and make the process more intelligent. Systems Engineer Jason Brewer and I wrote a BIOS script to provide a more efficient system of nomenclature for the devices and their serial numbers. With the help of a local temp agency, my engineers and I were able to knock out the deployment process at a lower cost and smaller time window than it would have taken otherwise. We came together as a team, worked hard, and got it done before classes started. The TekLinks engineers also assisted Huntsville schools IT department in distributing the 23,000+ devices to all the students in the weeks leading up to the first day of classes. LIST OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES TekEx Hosted Cisco UCS C210 Servers Cisco 3502i/3602i Lightweight Access Points Cisco 2504 and 5508 Wireless LAN Controllers Cisco 2960S, 4500E, and 6500E Switches Cisco Prime NCS Wireless Management TekFilter Anti-spamming TekVault Backup and storage out of the cloud TekVoice Hosted VoIP TekWeb Hosted website Cisco ASA 5525X Firewalls TekConnect private MLPS internet Cisco ASR1000 Edge Routers connection w/ metro Ethernet SolarWinds Orion, NTA and NCM Management Platforms TekCloud Platform for Free/Reduced EdgeWave iprism 500h Lunch Program Liebert UPS s EMC VSPEX and VNX 5100 SAN VMware ESXi virtualization Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint Page 6

8 Business Results In spite of a few wrinkles to iron out in the first two weeks of school, everyone involved considered the roll-out of the school district s new network a success. TekLinks engineers found that the bulk of the issues which occurred within the first few days of school were due simply to some unexpected behaviors of new products under the sudden, extreme load of 20,000+ devices on the network at the same time. Once the issues were diagnosed, the TekLinks team was quickly able to address and resolve them. With TekLinks and their partners Cisco, VMware, and EMC, we have had great success so far, says Dr. Wardynski. I believe that what we ve accomplished here is a disruptive change for schools integration of technology. We re very excited about the textbooks going digital; with the network we have now, we can remotely update the students curriculum every night so that they have the most current learning tools available to them for the next morning of class. The focus isn t the computers themselves; it s the access to a continually refreshed curriculum that meets Common Core requirements, and even personalizes the learning experience to the student s needs. Everyone s tireless dedication to the project has already paid off tremendously. Because Huntsville is the largest school district in the United States to adopt a 1:1 digital initiative, it has received national attention. In October 2012, a senior advisor for the U.S. Department of Education visited the district to survey the new technology and how it was working so far within the classrooms. And in November, the Huntsville school district was named a signature district by Project RED, a firm specializing in 1:1 technology implementation research. As a result of this designation, Project RED will analyze and offer support to the schools for three years. Huntsville s Project RED distinction and the subsequent study will prove crucial in helping other school districts integrate digital curriculum into their systems as well. It s a major step forward for Huntsville City Schools and for the community, says Griffith. What the engineers were able to accomplish in such a limited amount of time is nothing short of a miracle. The expertise involved, the multiple skill sets needed I would imagine that providing a set of solutions like this would count as a high point for anyone s career. I m proud of my involvement with TekLinks and with our engineers, but what I m most excited about is the impact it s going to have on our children. We re changing kids lives with these technologies. Page 7

9 HUNTSVILLE CITY SCHOOLS DIGITAL 1:1 INITIATIVE Business Results (cont.) For my 14-year career in IT, this is by far the largest and most complex implementation I ve ever done, admits Sanders. Without the teamwork, camaraderie, and the personal sacrifices that each person involved made over the summer months, we wouldn t have been able to go live with this infrastructure in time for the new school year. We decided early on that the process would not impede our progress, and we did it all for the sake of the students. According to Christie Finley, Principal of Blossomwood Elementary School in downtown Huntsville, teachers are already reporting a difference in the students classroom experience. Before this initiative, we relied heavily on PTA donations and funding for all of our IT needs, and it was putting quite a strain on our ability to keep up with the advances in education and curriculum that we were seeing around us. Now, we have the technology to support and properly integrate the standardization in curriculum that the Common Core foundation requires in the classroom. We can infuse a new rigor and relevance into the learning materials, and the students are responding very positively as a result. The students are much more interested and engaged in what they re learning, and the skills they learn from this technology will allow them to compete later on in college and in the workplace. To find out more about TekLinks, their premier IT and managed services solutions, as well as their industry-leading partners, please visit Summit Parkway Birmingham, AL Phone: Fax: Page 8 POWERING THE 21ST CENTURY CLASSROOM