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INFRASTRUCTURE

UPGRADES

After not skipping a beat during 2020, we continued to planned enhancements for outdoor areas and bus loops
have another successful year in 2021 upgrading many key to increase accessibility at schools.
infrastructure components.
Core Router Replacement: Again, finishing a 5-year
Middle School Server Refresh: All middle school E-Rate cycle, the “core” router upgrade at all schools and
servers were upgraded to new hardware this past year sites has been completed. The core router is the primary
on the normal 5-year lifecycle. This included upgrading piece of infrastructure connecting schools and sites back
to advanced networking features for greater speeds to District offices and out to the internet. This allows for
and the added benefit to migrate virtual machines with greater speeds and capacity at our sites and connectivity
no downtime or impact during the hardware refreshes at throughout our wide-area-network. All cabling (fiber) had
schools. Lessons learned from previous refreshes allowed to be replaced, as well, in order to take advantage of
us to complete this project in a matter of months. the greater speeds and was completed prior to the core
router replacement. Planning for the next 5-year E-Rate
VMware Upgrade: Over the past year, the Server Team cycle has been completed and the bid was awarded for
has upgraded our core virtual technology for over 2,000 replacement and redesign at all schools and sites to allow
servers and 200 sites to the latest version. This ensures for even greater speeds and connectivity along with more
our key systems are running at peak performance and robust redundancy.
have the latest security features. The District also invested
in HCI (hyper-converged-infrastructure), enhancing our Phone System Replacement: The School District has
data center technology. The District has deployed this completed all hardware and software upgrades to the
same standard at our 3 data centers to ensure critical phone system. Every school and District office is complete
applications are available in times of emergency events as of November 2021. The old system was originally put in
or disasters. place in 2004 and was deemed end-of-life and outdated
in terms of today’s technology. Planning for the upgrade
Wireless Access Point Replacement: The most recent began in 2015 and the infusion of referendum dollars made
5-year E-Rate cycle came to an end in 2021, completing a full replacement possible. District core infrastructure
the Wireless Access Point Replacement project. All installation began in 2018 and the first school installation
schools and District sites are upgraded to the 802.11ac was completed in August 2019. 2 to 3 school sites were
standard. Planning for the next 5-year E-Rate cycle has completed each week thereafter with only a 3-week hiatus
been completed and the bid was awarded, taking the in March/April 2020. Other key upgrades included eFax
District to the latest standard of 802.11ax and preparing our capability and E911 emergency services, which were
wireless infrastructure for the next wave of Chromebooks thoroughly tested at every site. Overall, 27,820 ports and
(and other devices) that will be migrating to this standard 12,940 phones were replaced.
in the near future. Essentially, we are getting “new roads”
in place for the next generation cars. We have also

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