When High Availability is a Need - Not an Option - For School District

Infinite Campus is a provider of comprehensive education software management systems for K-12 educators in state departments of education, regional consortia and assisting over 1,600 local school districts. They support any-sized district ranging from those with fewer than 100 students to more than 100,000. Based on a vision of educational transformation through the use of technology, Infinite Campus was created to help educators increase productivity and shift the focus back to students.

The Infinite Campus software management system provides a comprehensive approach to education from curriculum and instruction to reporting and analysis functionality. With features such as mapped curriculum support, an online grade book, lesson planning and even seating charts, teachers are able to simplify multiple tasks, which were previously time-consuming. Attendance, behavior and health records are centrally managed in one database with web-based access – providing educators and parents alike with easily accessible information. Communication tools including emails, surveys and parent/student portals allow an open flow of information among all involved parties and encourage parent involvement. To date, the company’s web-based, integrated applications streamline administrative tasks and centrally update and archive data from more than 4 million students across 42 states.

Prior to installing the PowerSchool Management system this year, the Springfield school district had a manual, distributed student information system where each school had its own server and records were manually scanned into the system. While implementing the new automated online system, Springfield’s goal was to consolidate its server count from 300 to 200 and eventually to 80 and consequently needed an application delivery solution that enabled it to do reduce server numbers while maintaining improved performance and availability.

The school is using VMware Vsphere 4 running on one physical box at each location connected to one centralized VMware server cluster. With fewer servers online, it increased the importance of assuring that each one is able to handle the increased load placed upon it, especially given the size of the school system. Springfield still has 58 networked buildings, including 51 schools, each one of which has every room wired for high-speed Internet access.

Springfield’s IT department almost immediately saw the benefit of deploying KEMP’s LoadMaster 5500 application delivery controllers. “Due to the server configurations, hardware load balancing was a necessity,” said Benjamin Wilson, Springfield Technology Operations Manager.

The decision process to implement load balancing technology at Springfield included examining a large number of load balancers and then narrowing the selection down to KEMP and one other vendor, F5. They decided on KEMP because of its combination of easy-to- use features and pricing. Even when F5 lowered its price, it was still not able to match what KEMP could offer in features and value. Overall, the deciding factor was, according to Benjamin Wilson, “KEMP’s products are built with the end user in mind with a leg up on ease-of-use of the product.” Specifically, the products are easy to deploy and integrate with in-place hardware and Wilson added, “KEMP’s products are tailored toward organizations that do not have the expertise of a Fortune 500 IT staff.”

The LoadMaster 5500 is KEMP’s top-of- the line application delivery controller. The LoadMaster intelligently and efficiently distributes user traffic and offloads and accelerates Layer 7 applications such as SSL security and content, to optimize web and application servers, ensuring users get the best experience possible.

The 5500 provides 99.999 percent high- availability, thereby removing the server load balancer as the single point of failure. The LoadMaster also simplifies the management of networked resources and accelerates user access to diverse servers, content and transaction-based systems.

As one of the school districts with an advanced technology plan, Springfield runs Microsoft SharePoint over the same LoadMaster 5500s. With SharePoint 2007, staff can share information across web sites, collaborate on documents and access and manage databases easily. With KEMP’s LoadMasters now in service, it can sufficiently handle Springfield’s current traffic load, and Wilson described the load balancers as “more capable than what we’re throwing at them.”

If Springfield needs additional load balancers for the district’s move toward an overall virtual environment, they can deploy KEMP’s Virtual LoadMaster (VLM). The district is also planning to migrate to a Microsoft Exchange 2010 server for unified communications, improved access to email, voicemail, and instant messaging from any platform. Springfield is also planning to implement a Windows Terminal Server farm for virtual desktop creation and remote desktop access. With each of these applications, the school system needs to continue to assure high availability; and with their enhanced support for these applications, Wilson says he “cannot imagine adopting any of these applications without including the LoadMaster because high availability is a need not a preference.”
As the school year begins, the pair of LoadMaster 5500s will be put to the test again and again, and Ben Wilson fully expects that they will be able to keep the Springfield school district’s server traffic up and running as well as provide an easy-to-access online system for its faculty, administration students and parents. With KEMP LoadMasters in place, Wilson adds, “We knew it was supposed to be user friendly, but we were surprised how easy it was to use and very pleased with its ability to scale to our future needs.”