None that I know of.
We do run an IT infrastructure, some of which is dictated by the state and
federal government. In fact, our enterprise consists of somewhere in the range
of 35,000 client machines (desktop, laptop and tablet) and around 1,500 servers
(my guess, I believe it is more.)
IT in primary and secondary education, as opposed to IT at the university
level, is a very different animal, and is often the "red headed stepchild" of
the organization. You have to have it for a lot of reasons, but coming up with
funding is not always a priority.
Some school districts, such as one that is an adjacent county to ours, treats
their IT infrastructure/enterprise like a business. It operates autonomously
and is not directly controlled or affected by the administration. This is a
good way to do things, as it makes for an excellent support base and avoids the
"entanglement" that occurs when administrators and politics get involved. They
have clearly stated goals and budget, and are funded in a manner that allows
them to provide the required services.
You also have to consider that in this part of the world (Florida) school
districts are typically county-wide, not town/city/township size. That means
we have close to 200,000 students, 20,000 teachers and staff, and an
infrastructure that has to support the 7th or 8th largest school district in
the country. We are as large as some Fortune 500 companies when you look at
the number of employees.
The cloud approach would be nice, but it's not practical for us. At least not
in my mind, it's not. I would liken it to a Citrix system, one that we used to
run at a local high school. Everything is server-based and the user machines
are essentially "dumb" terminals. Sure, you don't have to have up to date
hardware for the users, but you've got to have one hell of a back end with lots
of servers and bandwidth to handle things.
Our high schools each have a T3 line, I believe our backbone (which goes
through the University of South Florida) is an OC48 or better. Middle schools
and elementaries get a T1, some are on "fractional" T1s, I believe.
A high school will average about 1,000 workstations and 8-10 servers, a middle
school about 600-700 and 4-6 respectively, and an elementary about 150-200 and
2-4.
I guess I've run off a bit, but my point being that while IT may not appear to
be a core competency, by demand it is, and the volume of data we handle on a
daily basis doesn't seem to make cloud computing practical unless we want to
build a server farm.
One last thing - because much of the data we deal with involved issues of
privacy and Federal funding, we have to have very, very tight control over it.
Some of this is simply out of necessity, other being mandated by higher
authorities.
Dan
--- On Sat, 1/1/11, Allan Streib <str...@cs.indiana.edu> wrote:
> From: Allan Streib <str...@cs.indiana.edu>
> Subject: Re: [MBZ] OT - computer issues
> To: "Mercedes Discussion List" <mercedes@okiebenz.com>
> Date: Saturday, January 1, 2011, 6:57 PM
> What are your plans, if any, to move
> to "cloud" computing? Seems like a good move, on the
> surface, for any organization who's core competency/mission
> is not running an IT infrastructure.
>
>
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