Nixon-Smiley CISD investment 'will be worth it'

Nixon-Smiley CISD board members last week voted to purchase a new server to improve the quality of student learning, teacher efficiency and administrative leadership.

During its monthly meeting, the board was presented with a “package deal” server system that will allow the district programs to connect much more efficiently, be backed up properly and allow proper support for the numerous electronic devices now being used throughout all campuses and administrative buildings.

Although the equipment will cost the district almost $32,000, everyone is on board and is sure the investment will be worth it.

Sarah Loer, who works as NSCISD’s technology director, gave a presentation to the board on the new server, outlining its overall cost and how pivotal it would be in improving student, faculty and administrative productivity.

Loer introduced district technicians Mick Sudano and Andrew Alvarez, who she described as “a godsend to us because of their knowledge of the hardware and server stuff, and have been able to get a lot done.”

“When I came on board as tech director, we got some bids with Dell Computers,” she said. “It seemed that no matter what we did or changed, Dell stayed right at a $40,000 cost. This wasn’t including the software. So I went to Alamo Heights, and found a person who had redone their whole server project. He volunteered to come down to Nixon on his own time and walked us through the process. Mick and I got this feeling that the money was driving the project instead of us. So we backtracked, threw it all away and started over.

“Remember 15 years ago when you got a cell phone that didn’t do that much compared to what they do today, but it still did what you needed?” she asked. “Well, 15 years ago Nixon-Smiley CISD bought its first server. Instead of getting rid of that server, we just got a new one and tied it to the old one. By the time we finished, we had 15 servers tied together that didn’t speak to each other. So this leads to a lot of volleying back and forth between [machines] in Smiley and Nixon, and a lot of confusion as well.”

The new server system will be a more organized one, consisting of hard drives stored inside racks.

“It will be more organized, and we’ll know what each hard drive stores,” Loer said. “And if we need to at a later time, we can buy software to split the hard drives. So once we started pushing the quote instead of letting them decide what we needed, we got a server quote of $19,936.67.”

After that, Loer & Co. looked into a program called WhatsUpGold, which is a popular brand of network monitoring software available for $3,195.

“Part of our problem right now is every time we got a new computer, we didn’t take (old computers) off the system,” Loer said. “We just added. So on paper right now, we have almost 2,000 computers. Not that we’re running all of them, we’re just adding and never taking away. That’s where WhatsUpGold comes in.”

In the event a server crashes, Sudano and Alvarez would get a text message or email that very moment. If they’re at home on the weekend, they can decide if it’s something that needs to be fixed right away, or if it can wait until Monday morning,” Loer explained.

“WhatsUpGold will also track where the problem is so we can get it fixed promptly and precisely instead of running around like a bunch of ants.”

Loer also noticed increasing difficulties with students, faculty and administration being able to stay online long enough to get their work done.

Which is where Exinda, a company that specializes in network bandwidth management, comes in.

“For about two years, Dr. (superintendent Cathy) Booth has been asking for Exinda, which is a bandwidth shaper,” Loer said. “We’re allowed only so much Internet service from the region center. And right now, for instance, we can’t limit teachers to five megabits of bandwidth and the central office to two megabits. Really all we can do now is restrict, like zero megabits for Youtube. But with every educational site, whether you’re looking at TeacherTube or Study Island, you run the risk of getting kicked off. And this happens a lot – it’s been really bad the last two weeks.

“So Exinda has a one-time equipment fee of $6,600, but after that we’ll have an annual licensing fee of $1,944,” Loer said. “When testing time comes around, we would be able to dedicate five megabits of speed to testing alone to prevent kids taking tests from getting kicked offline. It will also make it easier for (human resources manager) Israel (Jimenez) to get payroll done.”

Booth explained that currently, anyone who walks onto the campus using a cell phone on Wi-Fi picks up the school’s Wi-Fi. “We’ve got strangers using our bandwidth, and suddenly we can’t even do payroll,” she said. “So it’s been a struggle.”