Case Study: Major School District Gets Updated WAN, Simpler Management, Lower Costs

The Challenge

A major school district in North Texas — in fact, the largest of 38 districts in the area—with an enrollment of more than 14,000 students, had a costly, poorly supported metro-Ethernet network connecting and supplying Internet access for their 28 buildings. They could cite several instances of network outages on the telco-managed Ethernet metro area network that had to be resolved by customer intervention due to the poor response time from the the incumbent telecommunications provider.

The Right Preparation Delivers a Perfect Solution

After conducting interviews with key school district stakeholders, Netsync conducted site surveys at each of the 28 campuses. They analyzed rack space, power and port availability, and switch connectivity prior to crafting a comprehensive migration and deployment plan. In addition, they ensured they had captured all applications that would be affected and need to be tested after the cutover. Netsync carefully documented all their findings, including recommendations, implementation details and network diagrams. They determined all Quality and Class of Service (QoS/CoS) configurations that would be needed to support multiple classes of traffic and queue prioritization.

For over 15 years, Netsync has closely partnered with Cisco, one of the industry’s leading manufacturers, innovators and thought leaders. As a Cisco Gold Partner, Netsync has combined its technical and engineering experience with Cisco thousands of times to deliver exactly what this school district needed—an innovative, budget-friendly solution that would not only meet their current demands, but exceed them and prepare the school district for the future.

First, Netsync and Cisco turned to a leading dark fiber provider to secure a resilient, highly scalable optical network that could be managed by the customer’s networking team. To support the new optical network, Netsync deployed Cisco Nexus 9236C switches at each of the 4 designated hub sites to support a Layer 3 routing configuration from the school district’s data center. With 7.2 Tbps of bandwidth, the Cisco Nexus 9236C switch delivers line-rate Layer 2 and 3 features for high-performance enterprise, service provider hosting, and cloud computing environments.

Netsync deployed eight Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series switches to handle WAN connectivity and Internet bandwidth at 8 additional elementary schools. Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series switches are Cisco SD (Software Defined)-Access ready, and are the industry’s most widely deployed modular platform for campus access and distribution deployments. At these eight locations, Netsync deployed Uninterrupted Power Supplies (UPSs) manufactured by APC, a leader in power management and surge protection. They provided power to the Cisco NCS2600 (Network Convergence System2600) chassis that Netsync deployed at those locations.

Received, Staged and Ready

Netsync received all Cisco equipment at its staging and logistics facility, installed necessary configurations, conducted burn-in testing, tagged each device and provided a detailed, up-to-the-minute inventory to the school district.

After receipt at each of the school district’s locations, Netsync’s tenured, highly experienced field technicians first ensured all data was backed up and verified. They performed all pre-migration configurations and implementations to include upgrades of all switches to the latest release of Cisco NX-OS. They set up the management interfaces on a VLAN and all required switch configurations. They ensured the new core routing to the 34 locations was delivering 10 Gbps WAN connectivity to each.

In short, Netsync ensured that prior to the go-live date, everything was fully tested and delivering the solution, speed and security the school district was after.

More Productive and Less Expensive―Sounds Like a Netsync Solution

The school district is now enjoying a solution that is perfectly suited for their current needs and is highly scalable to address future ones. The solution is exactly what Netsync is known to provide—an innovate, scalable and cost-effective solution.