Florida District Beefs up Infrastructure

By modernizing its infrastructure, the Manatee County School District has saved $310,000 per year in service provider costs and delivered faster broadband access to schools.

Over the past few years, the Bradenton, Fla., district reduced operating costs by beefing up its infrastructure. By working with the county government and the Florida Transportation Department, the district installed 125 miles of underground fiber in five separate rings throughout the county, said Vince Hoaglin, supervisor of network services, technology and information services for the district.

The rings can carry a maximum of 12 schools each and connect back to the central data center in a star shape. To prevent a fiber cut from disrupting service, the connections go two directions.

Four data center switches provide high capacity, reliability and redundancy. If one goes down, another one kicks in so the schools don't notice an interruption.

And the network speed in both directions jumped to 10 gigabits at 90 percent of the schools. Previously, the high schools had a 1 gigabit line; more than 30 sites on cable modems had about 15 megabits; and some other sites had 1.5 megabits.

“We’re getting speeds through the HP products that we would have never had before with our telecoms," Hoaglin said. "We wouldn’t have been able to afford it.”

The district's more than 50 schools use one network platform now, which makes configuration management and troubleshooting easier. The single platform also cuts the district's operating expenses. Instead of spending $340,000 per year for a telecom system, the district now spends $30,000 for a few school sites that were too far away to use the network connectivity.

The money the district has saved has been redirected to activities — ones "that are very meaningful to them in terms of student achievement, faculty recognition, just services in general to the community,” said John Godwin, education business development manager for HP.

Now schools can run robust multimedia applications, including data, video and voice. They're adding a lot of applications, some of which they've virtualized through VMware. Virtualization has allowed the district to place three or four servers on one blade.

The main data center also upgraded to the latest server models, which use less electricity, generate less heat and require less cooling.

The IT staff members used to face a maintenance nightmare as they tried to upgrade applications such as reading software at 20 different schools. But with the network's speed and new servers, they've centralized them and can update the software in one spot.

Instead of just maintaining service, the district IT staff can now switch to a proactive mode of planning for the future.

“Before, we were always the firemen called after something was an issue," Hoaglin said. "Now we’re able to focus on what are the future needs of our district and how can we meet them.”