District aims to enhance learning and teaching experiences
Dell has deployed holistic, end-to-end hardware and software solutions that enable San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools (SBCSS) to further its mission of transforming lives through education.
SBCSS hopes to consistently deliver educational services to more than 412,000 students and 17,000 teachers, administrators and staff across 33 elementary school districts with more than 500 school sites.
The ability to address the ever-present challenges in the California educational system are compounded by the county’s size, which covers 22,000 square miles, making it the largest county in the continental United States.
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Additionally, SBCSS is in the midst of four major initiatives, including a new funding model, the rollout of local control accountability plans as well as continued implementation of Common Core standards and Smarter Balance assessments. As a result, the county requires a robust, reliable and secure technology infrastructure to meet current and future needs.
“The implementation of new educational standards requires advanced hardware and software that support new ways to teach, learn and collaborate,” said Dave Hansen, general manager of sales, marketing and services for Dell Software. “By delivering a holistic mix of end-to-end solutions for the data center, network and classroom, Dell is helping San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools leverage leading-edge technology to address new teaching and assessment requirements.”
As part of Dell’s comprehensive portfolio, SBCSS relies on software solutions, including Dell SonicWALL SuperMassive Firewalls and Dell KACE Systems Management Appliances, to take security and endpoint systems management to the next level.
Using Dell’s infrastructure lowered the number of physical servers to six in their data center that could run upwards of 130 virtual servers. This allows the organization to provide bigger hosts and end servers for its teachers and students to utilize.
SBCSS has deployed Dell KACE Systems Management Appliances to enhance endpoint security as well as improve inventory, system configuration, OS deployment, remote systems management and help desk capabilities by automating and streamlining various tasks. In doing so, seven different products were eliminated while slashing the time and effort required countywide to support an array of Dell desktops, laptops, and Chromebooks as well as Macintosh computers.
As part of a major migration from Windows XP to Windows 7, Dell KACE enabled the IT team to reduce OS deployment time for a single machine from over 24 hours to 30-to-60 minutes, including building user profile data. Moreover, KACE appliances have enhanced security by making it easy to flag unauthorized software and automatically execute a removal script when affected machines join the SBCSS network.
To protect the countywide network from viruses, spam, spyware, intrusions and other threats, SBCSS relies on Dell SonicWALL’s SuperMassive next-gen firewalls.
“Dell has been a huge partner in our county, providing infrastructure, hardware, software and support in so many areas. As we face critical reforms in our education system and our needs of the future become more reliant on technological solutions, that partnership will be critical to successfully accomplishing our goals,” said Ted Alejandre, SBCSS superintendent.
Material from a press release was used in this report.
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