Keeping school in session

The Bainbridge Island School District, located on a beautiful island in Puget Sound, is a 35-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle, Washington. The district provides a world-class education to 4,000 children in grades K through 12. However, the district's network’s system uptime is often challenged by the inclement weather that often passes over the island. The area experiences many storms with winds that reach 40 to 50+ miles per hour. When that happens, power outages are almost guaranteed. The island is very wooded, so power lines are at risk when trees and branches fall. The district experiences about 10–15 storms per year and these usually generate about 12 power outages a year. Flickering power levels (brownouts) are frequent and these also disrupt the uptime of the critical computer assets. With such a widespread and distributed network to manage, and with limited human resources, the district needed a simple and reliable way to remotely monitor system issues.

The Bainbridge Island School District is located on a beautiful island in Puget Sound, a 35-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle, Washington. The district is highly-regarded and provides a world-class education to 4,000 children in grades K through 12. The district is spread across 11 buildings, nine different schools, one central data center, and 35 different data closets. The district's goal is to prepare its students for the global workplace, and to achieve this, access to information systems distributed across the district must be monitored and managed in a modern way. The technology needs to be smart enough to self-identify when a problem is imminent, so that any disruption to the classroom and its students and teachers is minimized.