Now more than ever, it’s critical for K-12 schools and school districts to build data centers that are efficient and cost-effective. At the same time, school officials also must make sure their data centers provide enough firepower and bandwidth to support 21st Century Classroom initiatives. With this in mind, school districts must get creative in the ways they approach the data center—working with solution providers to embrace alternative strategies such as consolidation and virtualization. On this page, you’ll find some empirical and anecdotal evidence about how to leverage the data center into one of your district’s biggest assets.
Five Tips to Building Better K-12 Data Centers
With dwindling resources in the world of K-12 education, school districts constantly are seeking ways to maximize operational capabilities while minimizing cost. As network infrastructure continues to grow into an integral part of a district’s operations, the data center plays a profound role in this equation. Many district technologists know their organizations cannot operate without a robust, resilient and responsive network, but understand that great care must be given to designing, implementing and operating this IT backbone.
With this in mind, here are five tips from experts at CDW Government, Inc. (CDW-G) for K-12 districts to consider when building data centers.
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Starting from Scratch: One district’s experience building a new data center
Sometimes the best strategy to pave the way for 21st Century classrooms is to begin with the data center and work your way out. Such was life for technology officials at Lee County Public School in Ft. Myers, Fla., who set out to build a new data center earlier this decade.
Lee County certainly needed an upgrade. The district’s former data center—a cluttered room built in the early 1970s, had poor fault tolerance and minimal network redundancy. It also lacked parallel power systems and chemical fire suppression equipment. Adding insult to injury, the room was so cramped that to deploy any new equipment, technicians had to take other pieces offline.
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For more information, go to: www.cdwg.com/content/solutions/data-center-optimization/
Resources
These resources are provided to give you fresh perspectives on the most important aspects of building a data center in the K-12 environment, the challenges associated with building a data center from scratch, and some of the most common networking pitfalls that K-12 technologists generally have to overcome when starting a data center from scratch.