District Makes Major Upgrades to Technological Infrastructure

Posted on march 29, 2008

Major upgrades to South Colonie’s technological infrastructure is saving the district money, while making the system more reliable and secure.

Under a 10-month consolidation plan, the district has replaced seven servers with one. The new server is performing the same duties but taking up much less space. This consolidation was made possible after the district switched to fiber optic cable, speeding up how information is transmitted through the network. The district is also now using virtualization software, which enables multiple operating systems and applications to be stored on one server instead of needing several.

“The benefits of virtualization,” said Jack Adams, Director of Information Technology “are lower costs, greater reliability, maximum utilization of software, and ease of administration.”

But perhaps the greatest benefit is system security. At periodic times, information is automatically transferred from the server and its storage device to a secondary backup device at an offsite location. Should the original server, applications and data become unavailable, the district can quickly switch to the backup device to keep the district Information Technology system up and running.