At StorageReview we frequently mention large enterprises and small to medium markets without elaborating on them to any real degree. The reason for this is that these terms can be applied to a wide range of businesses and organizations. One that would definitely fit in the SMB group would be a school. For this success story we look at Canyon Independent School District in the Texas Panhandle and how they have migrated to new gear over the last year. A special guest author, Michael Keough, has written this piece.
Canyon ISD is a rural, but rapidly growing, school district in the Texas Panhandle. We have 15 Schools and are currently building a new Intermediate school scheduled to go live in August. With roughly 10,000 students and over 1500 employees, we have 700 square miles of potential growth as opposed to our larger neighbor (Amarillo ISD) with only 70 square miles of growth potential. The district is extremely forward thinking, with a strong emphasis on extending learning outside the classroom. The Canyon ISD vision statement is "Empowering Lifelong Success" and as district employees, we take this very seriously.
Over the last year at Canyon ISD, my team and I have been working very hard to update our infrastructure by replacing entire campus networks, desktop deployments, and now our data center.
Much of our equipment ranges from 5-15 years old, so we were very much in need of a solid refresh and a structured refresh cycle in order to prevent this situation in the future. I was hired Jan 1 2017, and the refresh has been my number 1 focus. In fact we have cut hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the OPEX cost for technology by:
This isn't to mention the energy savings we will see after the new servers is installed. We currently have 4 completely full racks with the IBM gear. 3 of those racks are server and compute and 1 full rack is storage. The servers will be consolidated to 3 UCS blades which also lowered our VM (per cpu) licensing from 16 to 6 (2 per blade). The rack of 10/15K drives will move to a 2U NetApp AFF A200 and will only fill half that appliance while providing more storage and speed.
With our IBM system, we have been doing incremental backups to tape nightly and full backups weekly. We take those backups off site every day. With our new system, we are completely doing away with tape and implementing an off site DR using a NetApp E2812 (non business continuity, just Veeam backup) which will run over a 10GbE connection and be housed at one of our high schools.
I can't stress enough what an outstanding Partner NetSync has been in the process of our conversion. They are handling it from a complete white glove approach and it has been one of the best parts of this decision. The engineers are absolutely top notch!
We have partnered with organizations such as NetSync, Dell, Pantex, and Bell Helicopter to provide opportunities and technology for students in ways I believe are ground breaking. A few examples include:
Infrastructure in schools is often one of the most under-funded and least visible elements until it starts having problems that is. We were fortunate to have networking and server equipment maintain 8-15 years, but we really pushed the limits. In fact, while doing the conversion to newer equipment, we lost 3 servers and the Cisco wireless controller. This says a lot about the quality of Cisco's product, but also brings home the importance to implementing strong refresh cycles and building awareness among constituents and decisions makers well in advance.
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