The Londonderry School Board members were presented during their last meeting, held on Tuesday, Apr. 16 at the Town Hall with the Londonderry School District Data Infrastructure Planning.
The presentation began with an Article 9, saying “Shall the Londonderry School District vote under RSA 35:1 to create a district wide information network infrastructure capital reserve fund to be known as the ‘District Technology Network Infrastructure Fund’ for the purpose of funding equipment and services for the school district network infrastructure such as, but not limited to, routers, wiring, switches, access points, wireless network improvements or any other equipment software or service that is necessary for the maintenance, improvement, performance or management of the district’s network and name the school board as agents to expend the fund; and further raise and appropriate the sum of $275,000 to be placed in this fund; and further name the School Board agents to expend?”
The intent of the “District Technology Network Infrastructure Fund” is to continually appropriate funds on an annual basis for the planned updates and improvements, so as to avoid any large expenditure in a given year. The suggestion is to spread-out the overall expenses in order to maintain the network annually with the fund being used as needed.
The presentation showed the complexity of the current situation in the Londonderry School District, regarding the Data Network. There are eight buildings, with 18 data closets, 42 switches, 151 Wi-Fi access points, almost 3,000 Ethernet ports and over 3,500 wireless clients every day. There also 25 servers, nearly 3,500 computing devices and over one hundred smart boards and other accessories. All of the above is part of the local data network and the current connections between the different parts of the network is done through the old SAU district office building, due to current fiber terminations. The majority of the Ethernet ports have End of Support next year (2020) and by 2021, this number will rise to two-thirds.
The new suggestion is to address the End of Support products in place at the moment, lessen dependency on cabled infrastructure with continued emphasis on wireless, leverage multi-gig Ethernet support for the next generation wireless and wired needs, ensure throughput aggregation points are properly sized for downstream throughput, enable “Single Pane of Glass” Infrastructure Management, currently not supported and improve network security through access to wireless and wired networks per port access and manage a Bring Your Own Device and Guest access for security and efficiency.
The presentation marked several positive impacts to staff and students, should the new infrastructure be created: Continued support, better fault tolerance/reliability, improved speed, improved security and network accessibility, improved manageability and the introduction of metrics.
A Request for Proposal has been developed for the new infrastructure. The School Board had consensus regarding the infrastructure that was presented and agreed to move on with the subject.