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].