Would you like to be in any building, anywhere in our district, and be able to not just easily login to our network and access your own files, but also more easily share electronic files with other district staff... that is, without attaching them to an email? We in Technical Services want to make this happen... but it's not perfectly straight-forward.

When you create a Word file or read your email, you are using data that is usually stored on a server somewhere. As it turns out, most of MMSD's electronic data is hosted on servers living within each building, scattered across our 72 square mile school district. The simplified illustration shows how local building desktop computers communicate with local servers and then across our WAN (Wide Area Network) to the Doyle building and then out to the Internet.

Having servers distributed across such a wide area has been the norm, mainly because data communication capacity between buildings costs money. The higher the capacity... the more the money ... and we were getting by OK.

However... in a remarkable number of ways... including the amount of data passing between computers... times have been changing. Capacity needed for increased Internet use, more email traffic and more reliance on shared data between buildings has been growing rapidly, pushing the capabilities of our infrastructure.

Knowing this was coming, Technical Services and Building Services staff were able to negotiate improved telecommunications contracts and this summer have implemented our first significant upgrade in WAN capacity. This phase connects our 4 high schools plus Jefferson, Sennett and the Pflaum Road facility to the Doyle building with high speed optical fiber connections.

Between building data capacity between these sites is now 10 times what it was in June. This allows us to not only move a lot more data between buildings, but actually physically remove servers at these buildings, consolidating server functions within new hardware in the Doyle building.

This new consolidated system is called a SAN (Storage Area Network). By the 1st of August, all staff and students at each of these seven sites will be sharing the use of this centralized SAN. Our goal, partially depending on future telecommunications costs, is to complete this process across all MMSD buildings within 3 years, by July 2009.

So how does this affect daily life? Remember that you wanted to easily login to our network regardless of where you are? ... and you wanted to more easily share files with other district staff and students? You'll be able to. Plus, this new system will wind up saving us money while providing an infrastructure that will be able to handle increased data traffic... so we can effectively plan for continued growth in Internet use for instruction!

Please remember this implementation is not perfectly straight-forward; it will take time and will be done in stages, but we are getting there.