March 2008 — News

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'Augmented' IT Supports Massive Infrastructure for Virginia District

by Dian Schaffhauser

Coordinator Tom VanDenburg's network and systems organization at Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in Virginia manages about 3,900 Cisco switches, 240 routers, 7,500 wireless access points, and a multitude of servers running Windows 2003, Red Hat Linux, HP UX, and Sun Solaris for roughly 240 sites across the county. Each school in the district is wireless; operations run 24x7; and every day the network hosts around 12,000 concurrent users.

The work of keeping that infrastructure up and running is done by a staff that currently numbers about 400. Yet sometimes, even among those people, the expertise required to get a specific project done or handle a unique role can't be found. In those situations, VanDenburg turns to staff augmentation.

Staff augmentation, more commonly known as "contracting," in the halls of FCPS' IT department, involves using staff from an outside firm on a contract basis.

According to supervisor of network engineering Neal Shelton, the use of outside help is based on the unique nature of each project. "We meet internally and determine the scope of the project," he said. "We determine the resources we have available, and, if we identify that we need a resource that isn't currently on staff, we look out to some of our support partners."

Where Augmentation Works
Recent projects in which staff augmentation has been used, according to VanDenburg, are security audits and quality assurance testing on the network equipment, "to make sure it's meeting industry standard best practices," HIPAA compliance, wide area network security auditing, operations center infrastructure, and power and cooling and consumption assessments. It was also used for segments of the district's wireless implementation.

Although the IT organization works with a number of outside companies, all of those projects have actually been handled by a single vendor--Dimension Data. "They consistently and routinely bring some of the best engineers and analysts to our fingertips," said VanDenburg. "When we ask for assistance--whether it be on the wireless side, the local area network or wide area network or security side--they routinely bring out the best people they can find."

VanDenburg said the district has worked with Dimension Data, an international company with headquarters in South Africa, for about 10 years. He counts as part of that the contracts FCPS had with TimeBridge Technologies, a vendor acquired by Dimension Data in 2000.

Shelton insists the staff augmentation isn't just a matter of bringing smarter people to bear on the work done by the district's IT workforce. "We like to think it goes both ways. They bring in a lot of talent. We also give them ideas that they take back with them.... It's mutually beneficial. We think we give them as much as they give us."