Several of St. Michael-Albertville School District’s file servers were approaching six years old and they needed to upgrade their technology in order to keep up with the expanding needs of their students, staff, and administration. They were running out of server hard drive space, and the number of devices on their network was outgrowing their IP scheme. They wanted to take advantage of newer technology to increase their speed and productivity and allow for future growth.

Marco’s engineers worked with Wayne Hoistad, Director of Technology for St. Michael-Albertville School District, and his IT staff to develop an implementation plan to upgrade their network infrastructure, replace outdated equipment, and develop a new IP scheme to allow for future growth. Marco installed Windows 2000 server equipment consisting of five new Compaq servers, 3Com LAN infrastructure equipment, and a parallel network using a new IP scheme. “Our old IP scheme was limited to 255 network devices,” commented Wayne Hoistad. “The new IP scheme Marco provided now allows us up to 65,000 network devices.” In addition, Marco upgraded their existing Operating System from NT4.0 to Windows 2000 with Active Directory, allowing them to assign different security rights and permissions to their students and faculty.

Marco was able to utilize the District’s existing fiber and T1 connections using 3Com switches and Cisco routers to connect the new infrastructure. Wayne stated, “We were able to increase the response time of the servers and more efficiently move data over the network after the new network hardware was installed.”

Another issue addressed with this project was the installation of a new virus protection software package throughout the District, which became a major component of the installation. According to Wayne, “Marco’s engineers did a wonderful job working with us to provide a quality solution for our situation.”

This isn’t the first project Marco has worked on with St. Michael-Albertville School District. “Our School District has doubled in size over the past ten years, and in that time we have worked very closely with Marco to expand our technical services to support the needs of our students, staff, and administration,” said Wayne. “We have worked with Marco since 1987, and we have been impressed with their high level of commitment and Marco’s commitment to service. Our communities continue to grow at a considerable rate, and Marco has always been available to help us with our planning, implementation, and service.”

Marco’s implementation plan allowed St. Michael-Albertville School District to keep their old servers online while building their new servers. The switchover was done after hours to keep the downtime of their students and staff to a minimum. Wayne was very pleased with the overall installation. “We were able to work through the few glitches that came up without any problems,” he said.

Today, St. Michael-Albertville School District is taking advantage of the many benefits of their new infrastructure:

St. Michael-Albertville School District (ISD #885) currently enrolls 3300-3400 students at their High School, Middle School, Elementary School, and Primary School. Due to the area’s rapid growth and projected increase of approximately 200 students per year, the District is in the process of adding on to their High School and Middle School this year, and a new Elementary School is scheduled to open in the Fall of 2004. St. Michael-Albertville School District recently upgraded their original network and outdated servers to a new highly effective LAN/WAN infrastructure.