Kennewick School District
Enhancing student success and safety through a robust network infrastructure.
- Country: United States Of America
- Industry: Education
- Solution: Digital Age Networking
Kennewick School District (KSD) is the largest employer in the city of Kennewick, Washington, responsible for 31 schools that employ 3,900 and serve more than 19,000 students. A voice customer since 2003, Kennewick SD explored the performance, security and ease of management of the ALE networking solutions and began creating a network environment that would benefit student success.
Challenges
The network has become too important to fail, according to Ron Cone, KSD’s Executive Director of IT, as it must daily support and keep secure all student and staff devices, student data, applications, servers, networking, and a phone system. This creates a heavy reliance on the network and those supporting it.
Action
As the district has grown, Kennewick upgraded hundreds of switches, creating a futuristic backbone with a solid back-end network to deliver reliable connectivity that supports a broad range of services. KSD also streamlined management, giving it better end-to-end visibility and network insights, and adding automated features. In addition, the IT team built redundancy to manage traffic while preventing issues that could affect the performance and security of the network.
Starting two decades ago with an Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise telephony system and phones, KSD has since installed SIP trunks and continues to include a phone in each classroom.
Results
Technical Benefits
- Rock solid performance and reliability with OmniSwitch products, core to edge
- 100G links between data centre and schools
- Ease of use – OmniVista enables VLAN auto-joining and easy upgrades to Operating System and switches
- Centralised network built on AlcatelLucent OmniSwitch achieves 5-nines reliability
- Modern architecture - Upgrade to OXE Purple phone system and migration to SIP trunking
- Customised phone features
- Enhanced campus safety with Visual Notification Assistant migration for Alert Voice Broadcast System (AVBS) and Emergency Notification Server (ENS)
Financial Benefits
- RoI – Phone system paid for in two years
- E-Rate funding – Kennewick leverages ERate for on-going technology investment
- Longevity of telephony systems/phones and integration into modern IP network
User Experience Benefits
- Network performance helps staff realise new teaching options with modern digital platforms
- Increased IT productivity with OmniVista 2500 management platform
- Familiar, easy to use, long-standing phone system in each classroom with keyboard and by-initial dialling popular with staff
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Kennewick School District Success Story
DownloadThis success story describes how Kennewick School District has completely modernized its wired and wireless Networks.
