June 2007 — Asset management
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Taking Inventory
Using the Altiris IT/SAM tools, Little says, “we can see every piece of software installed on every computer in the district, and can also know about the hardware—what size drive, processor type, how much RAM, fragmentation, etc.” He says reports generated by Altiris allow the district to demonstrate compliance with software licenses. “And the system provides proactive information, like when there’s some kind of problem, so we can get information to our help desk or work order system before something fails.” In addition to the Altiris suite, Little says, the district has asset tags installed on every computer, “and that tag information is also in the computer’s BIOS, including ‘where it is’ location information.”
Time savings is another advantage of IT/SAM. Tennessee’s Scott County Schools has around 1,200 PCs and 15 servers in six locations—and “an IT department that’s really an administrator, a secretary, and me as the network technician, plus a general-purpose technician full time,” says Greg Bond, network administrator. “That’s a lot of machines to keep up with. Our farthest school is about 30 minutes from our central office; it would take someone a full day per site to do a simple physical inventory. We needed a package that would let us get a good count of machines and keep track of licensing, to be sure we were legally compliant.”
Bond says he and his team went with NetSupport DNA from NetSupport. “It’s been a critical part of our record keeping.” Without an inventorying tool, Bond says, “it’s impossible to fully know what’s on a machine, unless you have them locked down so tight they wouldn’t be useful. We can also detect programs that somebody else bought and installed, and decide whether we should be purchasing them, and Net- Support DNA helps us figure out where problems are. We can tell daily how many computers have reported in, and decide which machines should be replaced or upgraded.”
Not all school districts use off-theshelf solutions. To track its IT assets, Miami-Dade County (M-DCPS)—with 345,000 students spread across 340 schools—had been using the mainframe- based Property Asset Tracking System it wrote several years ago. The application handles districtwide tracking not only of computers but also furniture and other equipment.
The minimum value for a taggable item was first set at $750, but to reduce work in the field, the limit was increased to $1,000. Since M-DCPS buys many systems for less than $1,000 or even $750, explains Deborah Karcher, the district’s CIO, these systems would not be in the mainframe system.
“We have about 90,000 desktop computers, thousands of routers, over 300 administrative servers, plus another several thousand servers in the school,” says Craig Rinehart, M-DCPS’ administrative director of business and operational services. Additionally, the district is working on a 1-to-1 laptop program. This number of systems, says Rinehart, makes tracking assets imperative.
