Florence School District

Success Story

Novell solutions help a one-man IT team manage an entire school district by cutting administration time in half

Overview

Florence School District Five is one South Carolina's top ten rated school districts for standardized test scores and has the highest percentage of teachers who are nationally board certified. The district has approximately 1,400 students and 180 teachers and staff.

Challenge

Florence School District Five has an interesting challenge: one IT person to manage 700 desktops, 8-10 computer labs, four local area networks and one wide area network. Richard Silvernail was spending much of his time troubleshooting the servers in each of the schools, often resetting them a few times a week. Placing new applications on the servers was also affecting performance and storage availability.

Another distraction for Silvernail was fixing lab workstations that students had altered by deleting icons or downloading applications. The district needed to centralize its IT administration to reduce downtime, as well as the number of user support calls.

Novell solution

"I thought our overall Novell plan was pretty ambitious, but it has turned out far better than I had expected. I'm extremely pleased with how we've been able to make our users happy. The district is now much more receptive to technology investments because they've seen such great results."

Richard Silvernail
Director of Technology
Florence School District Five

After researching solutions and consulting with other district IT administrators, the district selected NetWare®, Novell Cluster Services™ and Novell® ZENworks® to greatly simplify IT administration.

"We installed a Microsoft Windows* NT server, but were amazed at how long it took to get it up and running," said Richard Silvernail, Director of Technology for Florence School District Five. "We also talked to other NT users about security risks and virus attacks. NetWare is far more reliable and gives us fewer headaches out of the box."

Using Novell Cluster Services, the district implemented a six-node cluster to manage its entire network from a central location. The collection of NetWare servers works together to provide the highest availability of network resources. If one network server in the cluster should fail, other servers in the cluster automatically take over, eliminating downtime and allowing Silvernail to perform application or server maintenance which is transparent to users.

"Novell Cluster Services won me over after we did a test with SASI, the student registration system which is one of our core applications," said Silvernail. "While the school administrator was working, we actually turned off the computer in the cluster where SASI was running. The system failed over seamlessly and he kept working without interruption."

Silvernail now manages the district's entire network from a single location using Novell iManager, a Web-based console. Users no longer get interrupted to reset servers and enjoy nearly 100 percent uptime.

As most of the district's support calls are user-related, standardizing workstations with Novell ZENworks was the answer. Students can now log on to any computer in the district and get a desktop based on their class ID and can no longer download screen savers or other applications that can potentially harm the workstations. With a standardized environment, Silvernail anticipates an 80 percent reduction in support calls.

The district uses ZENworks to install applications in a couple of hours from a central location, rather than hiring a few students and spending days visiting individual workstations. Silvernail can also image multiple computers at the same time in less than hour.

Rather than driving to the schools to provide support, Silvernail uses the remote control features of ZENworks to troubleshoot workstations from his office. Using ZENworks for inventory management also cuts down on travel time and provides a timely, accurate database of district assets.

"I no longer have to focus on keeping things running day-to-day and can spend more time helping students and teachers with technology," said Silvernail. "Having technology that is useful and available makes kids more interested in learning and makes teachers more effective."

The district partnered with Applied Network Consulting Group (ANCGroup), a Novell Gold partner, to implement its Novell solution.

"Novell solutions were a natural fit for Florence School District Five," said Brian Daughhetee, President of ANCGroup. "The district is a shining example of real cost and time savings — the ROI on ZENworks alone is huge. Most of our customers are school districts with limited budgets and Novell has all the best technologies to make what they have exponentially better."

Results

Novell Cluster Services and ZENworks helps a one-man IT team efficiently manage an entire school district and have reduced overall administration time by 50 percent. A 90 percent reduction in travel time allows Silvernail to spend more time teaching computer classes that make teachers more effective. He estimates that the Novell solution paid for itself in just a few months.

"I thought our overall Novell plan was pretty ambitious, but it has turned out far better than I had expected," said Silvernail. "I'm extremely pleased with how we've been able to make our users happy. The district is now much more receptive to technology investments because they've seen such great results."