South Putnam moves forward with technology upgrades

The South Putnam School Board has been striving to make improvements throughout the corporation over the past several months. This month was no different as the board agreed to move forward with a new technology plan.

Steve Ricketts of Five Star Technologies came before the board Monday night to offer his recommendations on a five-year plan for the corporation, which included wireless access, improving the infrastructure and virtualization.

"Over the next three to five years our focus will be on providing the necessary infrastructure, training and resources," Ricketts said. "There are a lot of options out there we need to look at what works and what doesn't."

Although, the goal is to get full wireless coverage throughout all of the schools, Ricketts recommended that the corporation start small by picking hotspots throughout each of the schools.

"This will build us a strong foundation," Ricketts said. "Fiscally it just makes sense."

Ricketts expressed to the board that wireless is becoming more of a necessity rather than a want and South Putnam needs to look at making wireless more readily available.

"The current wireless system is a series of hotspots that have to be managed and controlled individually," Ricketts said. "We've been pretty stingy on who can have access to those."

The new Hewlett Packard (HP) system, which was recommended and approved, will start out small, but has the ability to grow the system as necessary. The system can go up to 200 access points and will support the latest wireless standards. It of course will have a filter as well as security for all users.

To get full coverage access, South Putnam will need to look at installing access points in nearly half of the classrooms in the corporation. However, at this time the board only approved the purchase of 25 access points that will be spread out throughout all of the buildings.

The fast performance is expected to have a direct impact on staff and students.

"We're just laying the foundation," Ricketts stressed. "You're going to have coverage, but you're not going to be able to throw 100 devices on there at once."

As the wireless gets an update, the infrastructure is also in need of a refresher. The corporation is currently running on an infrastructure that consists of older Cisco and Amer switches that are at least seven years old. None of the switches is under warranty and the network is extremely slow.

As recommend, the corporation will move to a HP Network infrastructure, which will have a lifetime warranty along with a faster performance.

The issue of storage space will also finally be solved, as the new system will allow for a massive increase in space. This increase will be a major change as students and staff from all schools have recently been forced to constantly delete files in order to keep the space available.

The board agreed to move to a Vmware two-host and SAN setup, which according to Ricketts will lay the groundwork to move to Microsoft from Novell, which was bought out recently. It will consolidate existing servers to new hosts, provide fail-over between these hosts as well as include a disaster recovery system, in case anything was to go wrong.

"Virtualization would consolidate existing ser-vers to new hosts," Ricketts explained. "It provides fail-over bet-ween hosts and has nightly replication of servers to disaster recovery hosts."

The new HP 5406 Chassis Core Switch will provide all routing for all buildings. The true data center switch will have a lifetime warranty and be able to expand when needed.

There will also be an upgrade to the network switches to an HP 2530, which will provide connectivity to the network. These switches will also have power over Ethernet, wireless, phones and security cameras and a performance of 1000Mbs speeds.

"This is a base that we can grow upon," Ricketts said. "The next step would be to look at the way the curriculum is going."

The cost for the virtualization is $30,318.97, which includes two Dell power-edge VmWare host servers, one Dell power-vault storage network and all needed software and licensing.

The infrastructure and wireless portion holds a cost of $52,141.58 and includes the HP core switch, 25 HP wireless access points and five HP 2530 network switches which will provide connectivity.

Although it may seem that South Putnam is making massive strides to improve its technology it still has a lot of work to do.

One major thing that should be looked into is finding a technology integrator to help teach educators what can be done with the new technology.

"Ninety-five percent of success stories have a technology integrator on staff," Ricketts said. "You should find one or two 'rock star' teachers to begin testing it out."

The board will also soon have to look at workstation replacements, which were originally purchased in 2010.

There were 350 computers purchased in 2010, with 165 of them being in computer labs. All of the computers are out of warranty and Ricketts recommended to the board that they begin replacing staff computers over the next three years at a rate of 62 stations per year. The refresh for 62 stations per year will be at a cost of $43,400.

Ricketts also recommended replacing lab computers over two years at a rate of 83 stations per year at a cost of $58,100.

"At some point labs are going to become something that's not needed except for testing. They're (workstations) really used mainly for research," Ricketts said. "Workstations last longer. You get more bang for your buck."

The total refresh would take nearly five years. The board, howeve,r made no decision on when to begin that project.