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The Situation
The Elizabeth NJ school system is the fourth largest school system in New Jersey. It is the largest school system not run by the state.
With over 18,000 students, it has thirty different school and administration facilities. Thanks to the vision of Superintendent of Schools, Thomas G. Dunn Jr. and the commitment of the President of the Board of Education, James Ford, the Board of Education decided to migrate their legacy, proprietary systems to a network that would interconnect their remote schools with the administration. Finally, the Board wanted greater access to the Internet and more growth potential to accommodate their future needs.
The Challenge
It was soon obvious to the board and to the Director of Technology, Joe Pellegrino that such a migration from the proprietary systems to a network
would require a variety of complex technologies. They knew that their staff was limited and the skill sets to design and implement a new, complex infrastructure where not available in house.
In addition, the staff was not large enough to provide support for the new infrastructure after implementation due to the wide array of technologies that would be part of the new network.
The Response
Digital Controls' Technology Solutions Group (TSG) responded to the needs of the Elizabeth schools by launching a comprehensive analysis to
determine specific requirements and identify problem areas.
Plans were made to design the new infrastructure with special emphasis on utilizing as much of the existing infrastructure as possible. A network infrastructure (LAN/WAN) was designed to provide connectivity between their UNIX system, the Novell environment and their Windows NT environment. A two-phase plan was developed that started with implementing a LAN in the administration building built with Cisco switches and routers. During the implementation of the LAN, a new network security plan was also deployed to reduce the security risks associated with their legacy environment. After the administration LAN was built work proceeded on building their WAN to the remote schools throughout the district. Working as the school system's advocate with the local phone company, TSG was able to reduce the cost associated with leased lines out to the remote schools. With the implementation of the WAN to the remote schools, the remote schools were now on a 100-megabit backbone that provides them with much greater Internet access, and e-mail access through the district's new implemented Exchange server. Finally, with the implementation of the WAN and much more secure firewall was implemented to prevent hackers from entering the school system's administrative network. With the administrative network infrastructure built, TSG tackled the building of a students' network. The students' network needed to support 5 PC's in each classroom throughout the district. The implementation was complicated by the fact that almost all of the school buildings required wiring and electrical upgrades that necessitated a great deal of multi-vendor coordination by the TSG team. Also as part of the students' network a T3 line was implemented to further increase bandwidth available to users on the network.
The final component of the TSG total network infrastructure implementation was to implement a complete "one-call" support program for the IT staff at the district. TSG put in place it's single
point of contact service called SureNet Operations and Administration Support for the customer.
Under this program, any and all aspects of their network infrastructure are supported via a single call to the Technology Solutions Group of Digital Controls. SureNet Network Operations and Administration Support covers:
- ·Operations and Administration Support for their UNIX application server
- ·Hardware maintenance for the UNIX application server
- ·Operations and Administration Support for their Novell servers
- ·Support for any and all issues associated with their network.
- ·Multi-vendor research and resolution. (TSG is the customer's advocate with any vendor associated with their network infrastructure)
- ·Hardware maintenance on their Cisco routers and switches
The Result
"The team at Digital Controls' TSG, (Area Sales Director for Education and Government, John Perdue, and the technical team of John Marquis and
Randy Titus), spent an untold number of hours and visited our sites numerous times to be sure the new infrastructure's design, implementation and support plans met our goals."
Joe Pellegrino, Director of Technology
Digital Controls TSG new
just how to pull together the resources from their 30 years of experience in the Technology Infrastructure business to implement the most effective solutions possible for the school district. As a result of
the implementation of this new network infrastructure the district processes and tracks all of the Administration's scheduling, food orders, bus and class schedules, records storage, and even payroll.
The Elizabeth NJ school district is poised to move education and administration ahead with minimal changes no matter what technologies they need to utilize in the future due to their partnership with the Technology Solutions Group of Digital Controls.
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