August 2005 — Applications
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Doing More With Less
Despite a ‘peanut-sized’ budget, Georgia’s Worth County Schools finds a tool to manage and improve network application performance.
Worth County Schools is a typical midsize school district in Sylvester, GA, a town proud to be known as the “Peanut Capital of the World.” As is the case with many of our peer districts, Worth County’s networking budget often seems like peanuts compared to the demands of our mission—accountability, security, and operational efficiency— requiring us to do more with less.
Our IT department serves 4,099 students at five schools: Worth County HS, Worth County MS, Holley ES, Sylvester ES, and Worth County Primary. In addition to configuring, maintaining, and fixing our district’s hundreds of PCs and software applications, our IT team supplies connectivity to and within each school,as well as to the administrators, teachers, and students.
Getting to the Root of the Problem
We are responsible for ensuring high
performance from our networked applications—
from student information and
educational software, to accounting and
personnel systems—performance that
meets user expectations, no matter where
those users are. We also maintain internal
network security, enforcing access policies
to sustain the integrity of administrative
and educational information systems.
Finally, we must not only guarantee connectivity, but also restrict illicit use of the Internet, which can put us in a catch-22 situation in our middle and high schools. These students are often very computer savvy, but are still in the process of developing an ethical awareness. Ultimately, we’re responsible for keeping them out of mischief, but the better they’re taught— which is the district’s fundamental goal— the harder our job becomes.
Our existing suite of tools gave us a fragmented view of network and application performance, making it difficult for us to see the real source of our problems. We had almost no view of actual traffic other than what was reported from router and switch interfaces. What’s more, the view we had stopped at the edge of the Internet. As a result, although we updated our antivirus and firewall settings, we had difficulty judging the effectiveness of our security, which made it virtually impossible to be sure only approved applications were running on our network.
But all that changed when Systems & Solutions Inc. (SSI; www.systemsandsolutions.net), a Georgia-based technology integrator, installed a NetSensory NP-500 network application performance management appliance from Network Physics (www.networkphysics.com) in our district’s data center. SSI is Network Physics’ exclusive partner in the educational arena.
