San Bernardino County Overhauls Tech Infrastructure to Support Digital Learning Initiatives

San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools (SBCSS), which serves 33 K-12 districts in San Bernardino County, CA, has overhauled its technology infrastructure to support various initiatives, including the continued implementation of the Common Core State Standards and Smarter Balanced online assessments.

SBCSS delivers educational services to more than 412,000 students and 17,000 teachers, administrators and staff at more than 500 schools. With the implementation of the Common Core and Smarter Balanced assessments, SBCSS found the need to upgrade the hardware and software in its data center, network and schools.

To support these initiatives, the team at SBCSS selected a mix of end-to-end solutions from Dell and VMware. In the process, they were able to reduce the number of physical servers in the data center to six and run to up to 130 virtual servers. They also improved overall network capacity and reduced latency to support increasing connectivity demands arising from new Common Core curriculum and assessment testing.

SBCSS's new end-to-end infrastructure includes:

Administrators, faculty, staff and students in the district use Dell desktops, laptops, Chromebooks and Macintosh computers, and SBCSS recently completed a major migration of its Windows machines from Windows XP to Windows 7. According to information from Dell, the Dell KACE Systems Management Appliances "enabled the IT team to reduce OS deployment time for a single machine from over 24 hours to 30-to-60 minutes, including building user profile data." The KACE appliances also simplified the process of flagging unauthorized software and automatically executing a software removal script when the affected computer logs on to the network.

"The end-to-end Dell solutions we've implemented allow us to give better, more reliable and faster service to our customers, whether they're teachers and students in the classroom, our administrative staff or other needs that this organization has on a spur-of-the-moment basis," said Ted Alejandre, superintendent of SBCSS, in a prepared statement.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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