SAN Solution Efficiency, Savings, And Room To Grow At Ysleta Independent School District

Two years ago, Ysleta Independent School District (ISD) in El Paso, Texas, began the process of replacing the SASIxp student information system—its most critical piece of software. "The student information system is the most important application in the district," says Network Services Manager Doug Chamlee. "Along with grades, immunization records, and other student information, it tracks attendance, which drives 90 percent of the district's funding."

The existing IT infrastructure was clearly not up to the task of hosting a modern information package. "It was not surprising that we were having problems with availability, reliability, security, and backup," says Chamlee. "Servers with direct-attached storage were distributed among the district's 62 schools, each of which provided its own support. Our hardware and network architecture were both seriously out of date." Some of the PCs at the schools were 486 Pentium 1 systems, the network ran on Novell NetWare 3.1.2, and the student information system was a DOS-based application. "We had users who were literally going to have to learn to use a mouse," Chamlee says. "For all practical purposes, we were starting from scratch."

The new infrastructure was going to be the cornerstone for districtwide server consolidation. In addition to the new SASIxp student information system, it would be supporting critical applications like district email and a variety of future applications. "We wanted a lot of scalability on both the server side and the storage side for future growth," Chamlee says. "We do not have a lot of specialized knowledge among system administrators, so it had to be simple to configure and use. And we wanted it to be flexible enough to interface with a lot of different equipment."