Grand Saline ISD To Make Server, Bandwidth Upgrades

GRAND SALINE—It is time for a few more technological changes at Grand Saline ISD, school officials have determined.

The result should be better access to server-based software for teachers and students, assistant superintendent Trish Elliott explained Monday evening at a Grand Saline ISD School Board meeting.

"Our goal is to provide teachers, staff members and students with a technological environment that will help them become more successful and productive," she said.

Much of that centers upon two major changes, Elliott explained. One is an effort already begun to create a more efficient server network for the district, while the other is a switch from Region VII Education Service Center to a private company, Suddenlink Communications, for greater network bandwidth.

"It will be a real positive move for us and we should see a lot more help with morale," Elliott said in a follow-up interview. "Teachers will be less frustrated trying to use the technology we have given them and be able to provide more effective instruction in all classrooms and in communicating with each other."

She explained to the trustees that teachers had reported occasional access problems with some educational software on the district’s servers. Elliott said the problem often stemmed from "server sprawl," or too many physical servers on the district’s network.

Grand Saline ISD Technology Coordinator Lance Caffey said server sprawl develops over time.

"It is where you have a large number of physical servers on the network that generally sit idle most of the time, but for various reasons you have vendors that usually require their software on a server by itself," Caffey explained.

"You end up with a large number of servers and they get sprawled out because there is no physical room or you don’t have enough power to have them all in one area," he said.

The solution Caffey and his staff are enacting is the use of virtual server software.

"Virtualization will allow us to convert 20 physical servers into two with the virtual software itself allowing programs to run independently of each other. There are a lot of different features involved, but the point is to create high availability of the programs," he said.

It will also lessen the probability of a "domino effect," as Caffey put it, if a problem occurs with one server-based program.

Caffey noted that Grand Saline ISD is the smallest school district he is aware of that is implementing server virtualization, but added, "I certainly see it as a growing trend in similar size schools."

The bandwidth issue created more frustration at times, Elliott said, limiting access to some Web-based programs and bottlenecking Internet traffic on school computers.

"The bandwidth we were provided through Region VII (3 megabits per second or Mbps) was not sufficient. They are trying to increase bandwidth availability for schools they contract with, but it finally got to that point where we couldn’t wait...Bandwidth is a problem everywhere," she said.

Suddenlink is providing the district with 10 Mbps and the ability to increase that level in the future, Caffey said.

"It will make a great difference next (academic) year, and create a higher availability of applications so they all work all the time," he added. "So many applications are going Web-based, which will continue to increase (network) requirements and Region VII is just not in a position to facilitate that demand."

Other changes set to be in place by Aug. 1, Elliott said, include in-house hosting of e-mail services and more collaboration features through Microsoft’s Outlook software.

The first of those means that staff and teacher e-mail addresses will be converted to carry a new domain name of "grandsalineisd.net" instead of the previous "gsisd.esc7.net" name.