Learning Ecosystem
Bandwidth PlannerCase Study: Bandwidth Planning/Sculpting Within Plano ISD
| Organization: | Plano Independent School District |
| Location: | Plano, Texas |
| #Students: | 60,000 |
| #Schools: | 68 |
| Date: | 10-18-2007 |
Summary
How Plano Independent School District identified the bandwidth needs for curricular applications and implemented an enterprise solution.
Overview and Description
The Plano ISD Instructional Technology Department consists of student database managers, cluster support teams, and Learning Media Services. The student database managers' responsibilities include supporting the district-wide classroom electronic grade book and attendance system (Pinnacle) and the School Messenger automated calling system. Each cluster support team consists of a technology coordinator and technology specialists. The coordinator role includes assigning work direction to the technology specialists, collaborating with technical support services and telecommunications to provide needed services for the campuses, and providing overall planning leadership for the cluster schools. The specialist is to be a liaison between district program needs in curriculum, technology, and campus needs. Specialists are also assigned a particular curriculum area to support. They support campus initiatives as diverse as creating Internet pages to integrating a video image device into a social studies unit of study and everything in between. In addition to supporting an identified curriculum content area in K-12, the specialists are also "generalists" in various curriculum and grade-level applications.
Educational Applications Deployed
Over 1,300 applications.
Educational Challenge or Background
The Plano ISD needed to provide application delivery and content solutions to accommodate a curriculum for which many components were on both the local network and on the Internet. The local network's bandwidth was a potential limiting factor because the district had over 1,300 applications that needed to be installed locally. Distributing CD's to more than 31,000 computers was not viable, so the ISD needed to find a new way to deliver applications that were never designed to run on a network. The district also faced challenges in having sufficient bandwidth from the schools to access video on the Internet. The ISD was working with vendors on delivery of streams of more than 50,000 videos that are written into the curriculum.
Technology Solution (including people, process, organizations and vendors)
The solution to the Piano ISD's local and wide-area bandwidth needs was to build a high-speed enterprise network (combining and interconnecting separate local networks into a coherent, interoperable whole) that could deliver content in a timely manner while ensuring individual security. For Internet content, the ISD implemented a solution that integrated with its directory service to provide filtered individual content to comply with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and still deliver feature-rich streams. A hybrid approach was used for running the video streams from local servers, yet indexing the video in an Application Service Provider (ASP) model.
The enterprise-wide solution did not constitute a single project, but was a collection of projects. The largest project was the enterprise WAN involving AT&T. Plano (with the help of AT&T) connected all sites together with over 80 miles of fiber. The district now has a 20-gigabit backbone between five hub sites. All elementary schools have a 1-gigabit connection and high schools have a 10-gigabit connection to the hub sites. The servers are in a hybrid model also. Each site has a local server to deliver curriculum, and enterprise-class curriculum has been collapsed onto the Storage Area Network (SAN) in the data centers. (Plano has three data centers, and one is outsourced to a different city with a 1-gigabit connection.
The Internet connection is one DS3 that Verizon services. (A DS3 link is typically used by an ISP or a large business; its bandwidth is the equivalent of 28 T1s.) The district is planning to add a second DS3, and the state also provides a fractional DS3. The Plano school district has a class B Internet address space (IPV4) registered with ARIN. These addresses are used on the workstations within the district so no Network Address Translation (NAT'ing) is required. The bandwidth is sculpted using Websense (http://www.websense.com/), but the amount of streams still peaks the overall bandwidth over 100% of the DS3. (The district's plan significantly oversubscribes when inbound and outbound bandwidth are examined together.) To help the bandwidth to the Internet, the district is using caching. Over 60% of all pages are now served from caching appliances and the latest appliances are from Bluecoat.
Community Groups and Organizations Involved
The Piano ISD's Technical Support department and Instructional Technology were the main groups involved with building and supporting this solution. The Technology Steering Committee set parameters and policies for the solution. The steering committee is made up of teachers, administrators, and occasionally students.
Benefits
The main benefit of an enterprise network is that it keep costs low by using cookiecutter solutions that can be replicated and supported under the same platform. Piano ISD has split the district into three smaller components to simplify management and provided solutions that could be replicated without much manual intervention. The curriculum is web based and standardized so all requests can be researched and validated by technicians before they are implemented. Standards-based practices are vital to any enterprise solution.
Implementation Barriers and/or Challenges
Plano has faced many implementation barriers and challenges. Getting buy-in from all constituents was a major hurdle that had to be accomplished from the top down. Also, owning its own fiber was a huge undertaking; the district had to work with the city to obtain the right of way to get between the buildings. This was done with the help of AT&T and senior district management.