Success Stories

Hastings Prince Edward County in Canada Allows Sun's Servers to Sit at the Head of the Class

What began as an exercise in connecting school administrators through a wide-area network has turned into an all-out effort to provide secure, high-speed Internet access to 5,500 students.

For the last few years, the Hastings Prince Edward County Roman Catholic Separate School Board in Canada has been working steadily towards its goal of full computer access for both staff and students. While the initial business challenge was to set up a wide-area network for administrative purposes, the project quickly developed into an ideal method of incorporating technology into the school curriculum.

"Although we're a small school board, we have always had big ambitions," says Dick Kearns, Purchasing Associate at the Belleville, Ontario-based school board. "We knew we would want to hook up every PC within our board to the Internet at some point. We needed a viable solution to run our network, one that would stay current through the years."

Today, Hastings Prince Edward County is one of the only school boards in Ontario, Canada, at the Kindergarten-to-Grade-12 level to choose a file server for hookup to the Internet rather than the traditional router- or PC-based method that most other schools use. Server technology from Sun Microsystems have made all the difference.

It was during the 1993/1994 school year that Kearns and his colleagues considered the idea of an administrative network. With 16 elementary schools and two high schools spread out over a 7,500-square-kilometer radius, it was becoming increasingly difficult to efficiently track student management, accounting and human resources activities using telephones, fax machines or inter-office mail. A wide-area network, they realized, would allow school board personnel to share financial information, keep accounts up-to-date, issue requisition orders for supplies or maintenance and exchange electronic mail. Ultimately, students would be able to access the Internet from their classrooms quickly and easily using the same infrastructure.

Working with CanTech Solutions Ltd., a systems integrator and Sun reseller based in Kingston, Ontario, a Sun SPARCstation 20 file server was installed at the school board's head office and two SPARCstation 5 servers were selected for each high school. All of the elementary schools had dial-in access through modems to the network at the school board's office.

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On the software side, a number of applications were chosen to give school principals, vice-principals and support staff access to administrative tasks: Super HR from Oakville, Ontario-based Human Resources Technologies Inc.; Maplewood School Library from London, Ont.-based Maplewood Computing Ltd.; and, a UNIX-based accounting package, BBX Progression/4, tailored specifically for the school board by Canadian Business Solutions of Toronto.

Once the administrative network was fully-functional, Kearns and his colleagues turned their attention to high-speed Internet access for students.

"When we began planning for our administrative network, the Internet wasn't yet an issue," recalls Kearns. "But when it hit, we realized how lucky we were that we had chosen Sun in the first place. Our administration network was already running the TCP/IP protocol so we didn't have to learn anything new, unlike some other school boards and businesses. We were all set up and were able to just go with the flow."

Working with CanTech, the school board installed two Sun Netra i servers at the high schools, allowing all IPX-to-IP routing to be conducted from the board's internal Novell network.

Two SPARCstation 4 servers were installed ñ one in the board's maintenance area and the other at one of the high schools where it serves as a firewall. Kingston Online Services, CanTech's parent company, provided technical support, a distributed caching proxy service, software tools and firewall configuration as well as high-speed unrestricted access to the Internet through various communications standards.

The following year, four more Netra i servers were installed at three elementary schools, giving younger children the opportunity to explore the Internet from the classroom.

In total, Hastings County has acquired 10 Netra servers, two SPARCstation 4 servers, two SPARCstation 5 servers and one SPARCstation 20.

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Since the school board doesn't have an official information technology department, systems administrator Gary Simonds took part in a week-long Solaris Administration 2.x course run by Toronto-based Learnix, a Sun authorized training centre.

"Because we don't have a full-time IT department, we needed a system that would be easy to maintain," says Kearns. "We didn't see any point in building an empire just to keep the system going. With an absolutely flawless turnkey UNIX-based solution from Sun and CanTech, we have gone from zero networks to multiple networks without ever having to bring on an IT manager."

Phase Three will involve a JavaStation pilot which Kearns expects to significantly reduce the amount of money the school board spends annually on software upgrades and PC maintenance.

"Provincial governments are offering significant amounts of grant money to schools for the purchase of technology, but the sum hardly keeps up with the cost of trying to ensure that 1,000 PCs are updated in a school board of our size," says Kearns. "We want to minimize the cost of maintaining technology in the classroom and Java Computing will take us there."

Initially, five JavaStations will be installed in one of the high schools. Kearns is working with another neighboring school board to review the results of the pilot.

"You can only cascade hardware to a certain point," says Kearns. "A JavaStation won't run through an obsolescence curve as quickly as would a PC. The next few years will see a dramatic shift towards network computing and that's why we are looking at it as a feature for education."

Kearns urges other school boards to consider the services of vendors who are pioneering in K-12 education and are new to the arena.

Just look at the business and telecommunications trade publications, he adds, and it's obvious why Hastings Prince Edward County has chosen Sun as its technology partner.

"Open any magazine today and there's another story about how Java technology is helping businesses forge new strategies and business practices in an effort to expand their markets," says Kearns. "That's why as educators we can't ignore Java. We have to look at where it's heading and how we can use it in education to benefit our students."

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Sun Copyright [c]1997 Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, and Netra are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. All other product names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. Product features/specifications subject to change without notice.

Last updated on: March 16, 1998

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