Keeping Information Flowing At Dry Creek Elementary

Once upon a time, what is now the Dry Creek Joint Elementary School District was a one-room schoolhouse. Today it is one of California's fastest-growing districts, tending to the education needs of approximately 7,300 students. That change took over a century. Today, things change a lot faster, particularly in information technology.

"Our IT function is growing by leaps and bounds," says the District's Director of MIS Bob Lyons. "We were looking at a new student information system, a new document storage system, and several other data-intensive applications. We knew that direct-attached storage wasn't going to work anymore."

Lyons and his team knew they needed a storage area network (SAN) to meet their requirements for uptime and scalability. Lyons explains: "We wanted to increase redundancy, build a better foundation for disaster recovery, consolidate servers that were scattered across the district, speed backups, and, of course, accommodate the new applications."

Reliability was also a consideration. The district's eight schools are interconnected with fiber and span two completely separate power grids, one of which is subject to periodic outages. Problems arose any time an outage outlasted a system's battery backup.