Journal 3: Infrastructures

• What does your school or organization's infrastructure look like? 
• I work in a 3-5 school building. There are about 330 students in the school. I believe we have enough ban width to support all students and staff in the school. We very rarely have issues with connection.
• Where are there gaps in the system? 
• The gaps in our system come with personnel and transfer of support from when our old tech person left. He left with the system a mess and we are currently sharing a director with another school district. This makes things complicated when we need things done.

• What would be needed to improve it?
• I think if we have a good support system in place with the correct personnel and people with the background and education then this would fix a lot of the issues.

The director of technology in our district is a shared position with another district. This is new this year. I am not sure it will continue this way in the future. 

• What does your school or organization's infrastructure look like? 

Our infrastructure is designed using the "hub & spoke" WAN method. Lakeview serves as the hub, with Prairieview and Elizabeth Ide as the spokes. We are using Comcast for our district internet provider. We contract a connection speed of 500Mbps with them. PV and IDE also connect to LV with a 500Mbps leased-fiber connection. 

We use a Sophos firewall that also acts as the district's web filtering system. The switches in the district are all very old but do provide gigabit connections to the hardwired clients. Our wireless infrastructure is controller-based, meaning all of the wireless access points get their instructions from a single main controller. 

• Where are there gaps in the system? 

Our WAN has no redundancy in case of a fiber problem such as a severed line. Our switches are 10 years old and do not provide power of ethernet which would then power our wireless access points. Instead, we use power injectors which are costly and take up a lot of space in our network racks. The internet connection we have with Comcast needs to be increased based on traffic analytics and usage during the day. The same is said for the leased fiber connections between LV and the other two buildings. Our wireless controller is old, with no redundancy, and very old access points. On top of that, the network access policies are so tight that it hinders anyone from trying to use our systems without planning everything in advance. 

• What would be needed to improve it? 

We are undergoing a complete redesign this summer. We will be replacing the wired and wireless infrastructure from the ground up. New routing protocols will be used to ensure redundancy and reliability. Our internet bandwidth with Comcast as well as our leased-fiber will be doubled to 1Gbps. Servers systems will be virtualized and most likely replaced with instances that live in "the cloud" on AWS (amazon web services). We will begin looking at ways to remove roadblocks to network access while maintaining a high level of network security. To top it off, we will have a monitoring system in place that will keep an eye on things and alert us to any network anomalies.