San Bernardino County Overhauls Tech Infrastructure to Support Digital Learning Initiatives

• By Leila Meyer
• 05/14/15

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:

• Dell PowerEdge blade servers to support SBCSS's VMware virtualization infrastructure;
• Dell Networking solutions to increase network capacity and connectivity at both the edges and core of its county-wide network;
• Dell EqualLogic storage arrays to support the increasing volume of data;
• Dell PowerEdge VRTX integrated server, storage, networking and management solutions to augment and replace remote file servers;
• Dell KACE Systems Management Appliances to improve endpoint security, inventory, system configuration, operating systems deployment, remote systems management and help desk capabilities; and
• Dell SonicWALL SuperMassive Firewalls to protect the county-wide network from viruses, spam, spyware, intrusions and other threats.

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.