How we helped a major metropolitan school district regain user’s confidence in technology

Business Challenge:

A major NorthEast Ohio Metropolitan School District, with over 145 locations, needed to revive their use of technology by redesigning their Network Infrastructure.

VeeMost acting as a subcontractor for a multi-million dollar contract with the School District was charged with redesigning the core network Infrastructure.  The school district was looking to accomplish the following goals:

1.  Migrate from an old datacenter to a new datacenter in a co-location facility;
2.  Deploy blade servers and a SAN network in this new datacenter;
3.  Design, configure and activate a multi homed internet connection via multiple ISPs;
4.  Migrate all internet traffic from the older datacenter to the newer datacenter;
5.  Acquire an BGP AS and its own assigned public IP address space;
6.  Design the internal network of the new datacenter and ensure it provides redundant connections to the rest of the school district and the internet;
7. Migrate the entire network backbone from an ATM backbone to a 10Gigabit Ethernet backbone;
8.  Design and implement a solution for remote locations with no access to the network backbone to connect to the datacenter and use all the services provided.

Solution:

With over 145 remote school locations, the school district required a high level of technical expertise which led VeeMost to deploy one of its CCIEs in order to accomplish the objectives listed above and to solve the business challenges they were facing.

VeeMost implemented many solutions that are numerous to mention. In particular, we successfully migrated from an ATM backbone to a 10Gigabit backbone. We faciliated and ensured that the migration of the servers and services to the new datacenter was without a glitch. We assisted the district in acquiring their own BGP AS and IP address space from ARIN and embarked on a complex project to transition to 4 ISP providers using BGP. We redesigned the network for efficiency, faster access, redudancy and created several isolated networks for public servers and lab testing.

We recommended and installed WebSense internet blocking software to allow the district to adhere to regulatory obligations.

We occasionally performed network penetration tests to detect the vulnerability of the network at any given point in time.

Finally, we assisted in implementing a 24x7x365 monitoring of all their network equipment and services.

Results:

1. Efficient routing throughout the district ensured faster access to resources.
2. Proper network design with redundancy and load-balance ensured that a core device failure does not affect services and applications.
3. The success of this project contributed immensely in restoring users’ confidence in using technology as a tool to educate students.
4. We ensured that the school district was able to adhere to certain requirements and regulations. On behalf of the school district, we became a point of contact to oversee a mandatory yearly state security audit.
5. We oversaw the implementation of a project that provided a 24x7x365 monitoring of the entire district’s network equipment such as servers and the services running on them, routers, switches and firewalls.