A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
Like many other school districts around the country, the Martin County School District in
Stuart, Florida is constantly looking for ways to keep operating costs under control and
add efficiencies while maintaining a high level of IT services.
Thanks to server management technology from Avocent, the district has been able to not
only add efficiencies and cut costs but also improve services to its school administrators,
students and the community at large.
The district consists of 12 elementary schools, five middle schools and four high schools,
for a total of more than 30 locations, which include adult education and family learning
centers. It employs 3,000 people and serves a growing community. The school district’s
IT staff manages and monitors more than 100 physical and virtual servers. One challenge
it faces with the server infrastructure is that the servers are located in remote facilities
throughout the county, making it difficult to manage them on a regular basis.
Martin County School
District
Company
Martin County School District
Location
Stuart, Florida
United States
Industry
Education
Web site
www.sbmc.org
Applications
DSView® 3 Management Software
KVM over IP Appliances
Customer Challenges
• 100 physical and virtual servers at 30 locations throughout the school district
• Limited human resources in IT
• Reduced travel budget, limiting site visits
“We have a lot of sites that are geographically dispersed, and we have limited travel funds
for technicians to make trips to these sites to handle maintenance and support, ” says
Lucas Parker, coordinator of computer operations and technical support for the Martin
County School District. “We have to meet our customers’ expectations that we will
address problems in a timely manner.”
Adding to the challenge of server management, the district has an extremely small IT staff
and limited resources. Only two people are responsible for maintaining the more than
100 servers, Parker says.
“From a pure technology standpoint, the solution Avocent
provides has more and better features than other products
and tested better in our environment when we evaluated it.”
– Lucas Parker, Coordinator of Computer Operations and
Technical Support
Server management was clearly becoming a huge headache, and the district determined
that it needed to find a way to easily and quickly handle server fixes remotely without
having the IT technicians drive to the various server sites whenever an issue arose.
“We decided to modernize our remote access and management systems,” Parker says.
“One of the key requirements was to have remote KVM access to servers. In addition to
having only a small staff, our travel budget has been reduced every year, so the less travel
and more flexibility the team had, the better.”
Avocent Met District’s Needs
The district began exploring a few technology options in 2008 and ultimately selected the
Avocent branch/remote office management solutions.
This solution is made up of both software and hardware that work together to empower
the IT staff to do more remotely and make the organization more efficient. The DSView
A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
3 management software provides a single interface for the IT staff to
authenticate and access the remote Avocent appliances and the IT
equipment that is attached.
considered in selecting the technology were the anticipated reliability
of the technology and its ease of use. Furthermore, the Avocent solution
has inherent security functionality that meets the district’s needs to
protect data and provide secure access to servers.
The Avocent KVM over IP appliances provide IT administrators a
complete and secure remote management solution to access and
control servers and other equipment found in data centers and remote
or branch offices. These appliances provide remote users the capabilities
of a direct, physical connection to KVM, USB and serial ports of servers
and other IT equipment from anywhere. This enables administrators to
improve troubleshooting, shorten response times and help minimize
unplanned downtime.
Parker points out that the implementation “took a while because we had
to physically install all the devices and then manually configure all the
switches as well as the DSView 3 software.” But the implementation was
well worth the wait, he adds.
A feature known as virtual media, available on some KVM over IP
appliances, provides more advanced remote management capabilities.
This feature allows IT administrators to virtually map USB storage devices
and CAC/smart card readers to remote servers to transfer files, load
applications or even reinstall an entire operating system.
In addition to the KVM over IP appliances to access its physical servers,
the school district deployed the Avocent DSView 3 management
software to manage its KVM appliances and also to access its virtual
servers. The DSView 3 software provides a single, secure, browser-based
interface to access the physical devices attached to various Avocent
appliances and also integrates access to manage virtual servers from
both Citrix and VMware.
“We can easily press a key from across town without having to dispatch
someone,” he says. “People don’t have to travel as much, and we can
provide services in less than half an hour instead of taking as long as an
hour, as we used to for some sites in the district.”
Parker says the district selected the Avocent solutions, because they
provided all the technical capabilities the organization needed, including
its tie-ins to VMware virtualization software. The district has been in
the midst of a strategy to virtualize its servers as part of an effort to
reduce its reliance on physical servers. Parker also says that support for
virtualization was a key consideration when the district was choosing a
technology to modernize the remote monitoring of its IT assets.
“From a pure technology standpoint, the solution Avocent provides has
more and better features than other products and tested better in our
environment when we evaluated it,” Parker says.
Managers tested the Avocent solutions prior to implementation and
had a “positive experience,” Parker says. Other factors district officials
Travel Time and Server Downtime Decline
By implementing the Avocent solution, the Martin County School District
was able to address its key challenge of providing immediate service
to its geographically dispersed campuses. The product enables the
organization to resolve a variety of server issues without having to send a
technician to the server site. This has enabled it to save time in resolving
issues, cut down on travel time for IT staff—with the associated dollar
savings—and experience less server downtime, Parker says.
Now, if an issue arises with one of the servers, IT can address the problem
remotely. Depending on the nature of the issue, managers can either
troubleshoot the problem from the main office or send out a technician
if necessary.
Parker says the Avocent solution has been well received at the district.
“We use it once a week or more. More often than not, it can save travel or
give us insight, so we can dispatch the right person with the right tools,”
he says. “Every time we’ve used this product, I say it’s worth the cost.”
“We now have shorter time to service, and less travel is required for fixing
problems during work hours, as well as off-hours for technicians on call,”
Parker says. “If you have an environment with distant locations or have
long travel times such as in a congested city, this is a solution I’d suggest,
because it enables analysts and engineers to see what the device is
doing, as though they were standing there. That can be invaluable.”
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