In the wake of last year’s series of hurricanes and other natural disasters, CDW Government Inc. (CDW-G) is offering recommendations that schools can use to avert IT breakdowns. While the hurricanes should have been a wakeup call, the company says, many schools–strapped for cash and IT personnel–still struggle to prepare for disasters and protect vital information.

“Few schools prepare in advance for disasters, and fewer yet have comprehensive disaster recovery plans in place,” said Vic Berger, lead technologist at CDW-G. “Despite the shift toward automated record keeping and centralized computer data, a brick-and-mortar mentality still prevails. We want to build awareness both of the problem and of the solution.”

CDW-G’s recommendations to improve the disaster preparedness of schools include:

Collier County Public Schools, located on Florida’s hurricane-prone Gulf Coast, has put CDW-G’s recommendations into practice, demonstrating how schools can prepare for disasters. The fast-growing district, with 44,000 students and 55 schools, has contracted with CDW-G and APC, a provider of infrastructure availability solutions, to design and supply an IT infrastructure that ensures data protection and continuity of operations.

This infrastructure supports a network management system from Novell and security tools from Cisco Systems for 21,000 workstations, 1,200 routers and switches, and 300 servers. Instructional usage is the network’s primary goal and represents 95 percent of the district’s data, including all student and teacher home directories and application data that track student progress.

To protect these data, Collier County recently launched a new data center at Palmetto Ridge High School to serve as a disaster recovery “hot site.” Twenty miles from the main facility and located further inland, this second site should be less prone to catastrophic damage from high winds and flooding, officials say.

“If you’re centralizing your resources as much as we are, putting all your eggs in one basket doesn’t make much sense,” said Tom Petry, Collier County’s coordinator of network technology. The Palmetto Ridge site will serve two functions, he said–as an emergency recovery center, and as a secondary data collection resource, to keep up incrementally with the district’s growth in school buildings and data-storage needs.

Live data synchronization connects this new backup center with the main facility where critical electronic data are now stored. “[We] identified what data were mission-critical and built the cost of synchronizing these data into the system’s price to ensure that data were secured,” Petry said.

In addition, a fiber-optic network that will connect every school in the district is now under construction. “Now that all of our servers are being centralized, we wanted to avoid a single point of failure,” Petry said.

If the power fails at the main storage facility, Collier County has a generator that works for 36 hours on battery backup. The new disaster recovery hot site will offer additional redundancy protection. As a designated hurricane shelter, it is designed to sustain a category-5 storm surge.

Natural disasters are not the only threats Collier County is prepared for. The district also ensures the integrity of student and employee data from hackers with Novell Identity Manager, which continually updates information, synchronizes user identities, and secures communication. On occasions when the district has been hit by a virus, the IT staff has been able to distribute patches through the system without network interruption. Through Collier County’s multilayered approach, officials say, the district has the tools it needs to secure itself from threats, whether natural or man-made.

Link: Collier County Public Schools
http://www.collier.k12.fl.us