Central Valley School District Simplifies Migrates from T1 to Fiber

Company Profile

Located in the state of Washington, USA, the Central Valley School District serves more than 11,000 students. Across the 80-square-mile district, the district connects the students, families, schools, business and civic organizations of together in partnership to deliver quality public education in support of student achievement. CVSD’s technology group strives to ensure an optimal learning and business environment for students and faculty in 23 locations across a nine mile radius. The Central Valley School District’s 2004/2005 budget is $85.1 million, with about 1% allocated for technology. The district receives funding from state, federal and local sources and is responsible for justifying budget expenditures to those groups.

Customer Benefit

Paessler’s PRTG Traffic Grapher enables the technology group to monitor the more than 80 interfaces across their network. PRTG makes it possible for administrators to create reports and monitor traffic without having to know how to edit a Web page. By simply pointing at a device they can create graphs for either bandwidth or errors which allows the team to ensure smooth operation of the district’s network at a minimal investment of dollars or resources.

Challenge

CVSD has been converting from a T1 infrastructure to Gig fiber over the past few years. Previously, when each new fiber connection was made, considerable time or money was spent converting their old solution, MRTG, from the T1 based routers to the new Gig fiber routers. The team needed a solution that did not require Perl scripts or other Web configuration knowledge, was within their budget and was easy to implement.

Solution

PRTG Traffic Grapher fit the bill.  Using Windows based wizards, PRTG makes adding sensors and devices easy – without coding or difficult configuration set up. It’s intuitive interface means less time is spent adding new connections and more information on the health of the network is available. Network and bandwidth usage as well as parameters such as memory and CPU usages are provided to system administrators with live readings. Periodical usage trend reports will help CVSD to optimize their network investment and will provide them with critical data for evaluating upgrade timing.

Paessler Router Traffic Grapher

PRTG Traffic Grapher results may be viewed either via Windows interface or Web interface. Sample reports may be viewed at http://www.paessler.com/prtg. PRTG is available in both a Freeware edition and in Commercial editions that provide monitoring for several network devices and multiple ports simultaneously. PRTG works with most routers and firewalls, including systems from Cisco, Draytek, Bintec or LANCOM and Windows servers. PRTG also operates with most other SNMP enabled devices.