In my last post, “Sustaining the Unsustainable”, I examined the status of a small district completely overwhelmed by the trials and tribulations of maintaining a 500 + workstation network. National statistics show that this district’s technical support struggles are like many other districts throughout the country. There is no doubt that schools are struggling to maintain the technology that they have in place today. Unfortunately, the more inconsistent and unreliable the technical support and infrastructure becomes, the less it is used to its full potential by teachers and students.

If you believe, as I do, that we are on our way to a ubiquitous, ‘one laptop per child’ world, then the challenges we are experiencing sustaining the technology we have now, are just previews of the larger technical support and infrastructure issues we will be facing in the future. In the case of the little district we have been discussing, think about supporting 1500 computing devices (most of them mobile) instead of 500.

It’s time to explore a new networking paradigm; one that allows us to grow our networks in a way that doesn’t multiply our technical support workload the way present the ‘best practice’ of supporting hundreds, even thousands of individual hard drives does.

A simplistic explanation of ‘virtualization’ is that we remove the software applications that now reside on individual hard drives throughout our buildings, and install them on centralized file servers. When a student or teacher uses a piece of software, it is not running on their individual workstation, it is running on a file server; thus their workstation is a ‘virtual’ one.

So what are the benefits of designing our network infrastructures this way?

1. Instead of supporting the software installed on hundreds/thousands of hard drives, we manage a much smaller number of easily accessible, centralized file servers. In this new scenario, a network technician can support many, many more computers than is possible, in the old distributed computing environment.

2. We can easily install and update software on the servers so that every workstation runs the same version of an application. The time consuming work of ‘pushing’ software out to workstations, ghosting workstation images, etc. becomes a thing of the past.

3. Because our workstations are ‘virtual’, and we are using neither their processing power nor their hard drive space; we can keep our older computers for longer periods of time.

4. Once again, because we are using our files servers to run our software, we can begin to purchase lower cost computing devices, some of which may have no hard drives, or moving parts.

No moving parts, means fewer maintenance issues.

Lower cost devices translate into larger numbers of computers for students.

5. Improvements in ‘virtualization’ technologies make it possible to provide much higher application performance levels, as well as reliability, and ‘uptime’. Application file servers can ‘load balance’ as applications are being run. When you run a piece of software it will always open on the ‘least busy’ file server. In addition, when a file server fails for some reason, the applications don’t stop being delivered, they simple are opened on the other fully functioning servers.

6. Because the software is running on servers, you can access your applications from any computer (with network or Internet connectivity), from anywhere, including home. When you log into the network, whether at home or somewhere in the school building, your applications are at your fingertips even if they are not on the computer at which you are sitting. This translates to 24×7x7 access to all your applications and files.

Districts like Lemon Grove have gone a long way to showcase the benefits of ‘virtualizing’ their infrastructures.

Sometimes our current ‘best practices’ prevent us from seeing new possibilities. It’s time to begin to develop a new paradigm for our infrastructures; one that makes sense in an emerging, increasingly mobile, ‘one to one’ world.

pete

Note:
What are the technical challenges and costs of ‘virtualization’? What is the downside of ‘virtualization’? What are some of the concerns and issues that are raised by detractors of the new paradigm? This will be the focus of our next post.

I recently completed a tech audit/assessment for a small district that pulled back the covers on the challenges many K-12 school districts face as they address the educational technology needs of their schools.

The school has three buildings, 1,200 students, and 500 plus networked computers.

When I interviewed teams of educators from each building, I encountered a great deal of frustration with the reliability of the infrastructure and the poor level of technical support. It was no surprise given that there was only one, overworked, overwhelmed person in charge of the entire ed tech program.

National statistics like these are one thing:

75% of school leaders say they don’t have enough staff to meet their needs.
55% say they can’t maintain their network adequately.
64% say their IT budget isn’t enough to support the technology they already have.
70% say the IT budget isn’t enough to meet their district’s expectations.
63% said they can’t plan for new technologies.
76% have trouble implementing new technologies.

But seeing the reality up close and personal is quite another.

Here were some of the audit’s findings:

The lone technology person divided their time among the following tasks:

• Troubleshooting and resolving network problems reported by teachers and administrators.

• Installing new computers and new software.

• Implementing special projects like putting wireless in the elementary school.

• Monitoring and updating the district’s firewall, spam filter, and content filter.

• Monitoring, supporting and patching the district’s file servers and switches.

• Monitoring and administering the district’s e-mail system.

• Implementing daily backups of the district’s data.

• Researching and pricing hardware and software requests to insure they are compatible with the infrastructure.

• Implementing general network administration, such as adding new users, removing users who leave the district, recreating passwords, administering user rights and privileges, rolling over students from year to year.

• Applying for, and complying with, E-rate and other state and federal programs and grants.

Is it any wonder that computers sat uninstalled for months, that requests for technical support often fell into a “black hole”, and that the network was unreliable?

When the tech person focused on installs… the daily network calls went unanswered.

When they focused on the daily network calls.. the installs stopped.

When something really important like E-Mail stopped working… both installs and network calls were ignored because the ‘emergency’ took precedence.

But the problems went deeper. Backups were done only once per week AND when the tech person (10 month employee) was on vacation, sick, or away for any reason…No Backups were being done! Tapes were never stored off-site.

Software installs and updates were rarely done because doing them meant visiting 500+ workstations. Patches on the firewall were not up to date, and this was just the ‘tip of the iceberg’, the list of problems went on and on.

The district and the tech coordinator were trying to sustain the unsustainable.

To one degree or another, most districts in the U.S. face similar challenges. As I see it we have three options:

1. Live with the problem (frustrated teachers, district data at risk, low productivity, and high levels of stress and overwhelm for tech staff)
2. Throw money and resources at the problem (add more tech staff at a time of decreasing resources)
3. Change the ed tech network paradigm (virtualize the servers and workstations, develop easy to use menus for the users, and provide 24×7 access to all appropriate network resources from home)

What does it mean to virtualize servers and workstations and how does this help solve the challenges of too many computers and too few tech support people?

What kind of menus are we talking about and how do they reduce the technical workload?

Doesn’t creating a network that is available 24×7 from anywhere with an Internet connection, create more, not less, work?

We’ll examine the answers to those questions next time.

pete