Success Stories

Sun and URLabs Help Manage classroom Internet Access for One of British Columbia's Largest Schools District

With more than 58,000 primary and secondary students, the Surrey School District #36 is the largest district in British Columbia and is responsible for 123 different schools and district sites: 94 elementary schools, 18 high schools, five learning centers, and six district sites. Surrey recently incorporated network and computer technology throughout its schools, educational centers, and administrative facilities, for which Internet access was a key component.

"We have a very large demand for Internet access. In other words, it was our goal to have every school fully networked throughout the whole district, and have Internet access everywhere throughout the school," explains Ian McLeod, Director, Information Management Services, Surrey school district.

Surrey began its search for a solution in February 1999. Looking for a system that would provide cost-effective filtering and proxy serving, the school district performed a thorough evaluation of several products. The majority of the products reviewed were school/site-based focused management solutions in product design, as opposed to a more centrally managed solution. Surrey wanted the solution to be managed at the district level, which would include supporting thousands of potential workstations. They also wanted a centralized approach for its schools, to be able to deliver service to more than 90 elementary schools immediately and bring the secondary schools online by the end of the 1999 school year.

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After a demonstration of the URLabs' I-Gear Internet Content Management software running on Sun Enterprise servers, Surrey decided to pilot the solution for its elementary schools.

"Our objective was to implement a proxy-server environment to minimize the amount of traffic because we pay our Internet Service Provider (ISP) based on traffic. We also knew we had to implement some type of filtering," says McLeod.

As the only comprehensive content management application with schools' needs in mind, I-Gear includes all the functionality Surrey needs to make the Internet safe and enhance instructional use of the Internet in the classroom. A centrally managed Internet solution removed the need for site-level expertise, which was not only hard to develop, but expensive to fund.

The deployment of I-Gear on a Sun server in Surrey represents a continuing effort by Sun and URLabs to jointly pursue the worldwide education market. "URLabs' I-Gear product is a proven technology used in thousands of schools around the world, providing a barrier to various unknown elements on the Web and enhancing students' overall Web-based learning experience," states Robert Iskander, Director of Global Primary and Secondary (K12) Education and Research for Sun Microsystems. He adds, "The integration of I-Gear software with Sun Enterprise servers provides a powerful, reliable, and easy-to-use Primary and Secondary (K12) Internet server solution, with proven results throughout North America."

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For the pilot program, Surrey put all the elementary schools on I-Gear software running on a Sun Ultra Enterprise 5 server. "Basically, we had 90 schools all filtering through the same I-Gear/Sun system. Sun and URLabs thought we were going to run one to two elementary schools-not 90 schools-but it worked perfectly," says McLeod.

Based on the success of the pilot program, Surrey purchased a Sun Enterprise 250 server for the elementary schools, with 600 simultaneous I-Gear licenses running on a wide-area network.

"The I-Gear software gives us state-of-the-art DDR (Dynamic Document Review) and address filtering, so the software itself was the exact motivation for implementing the Sun solution. Sun had the best hardware solution for the I-Gear software," states McLeod.

"The Sun and I-Gear solution also provides teachers the comfort of knowing their students are protected from inappropriate sites," adds McLeod.

Surrey liked the Sun Enterprise server so much, they decided to purchase a twin server to run the secondary schools. The two Sun Enterprise 250 servers are configured with dual CPUs-one with 300 MHz and the other server with 400 MHz, each has one gigabyte of memory and two 9.1 gigabyte internal drives for their storage needs. The elementary schools are configured for one level of filtering and the secondary schools for another level. This allows Surrey to control the students' access to certain Web sites. In addition, the twin Sun servers provide basic redundancy. If the district needs to take one server off-line for maintenance or upgrades, they can still provide Internet access through the other server. And, by running the latest version of Sun's Solaris Operating System, Surrey can take advantage of the high availability network connectivity, including Internet gateway access in its school environments.

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To help with the installation, Sun worked closely with Surrey's technical services group to make sure the system would run smoothly.

Sun and URLabs relationship demonstrates a commitment to providing highly scalable content management solutions that meet the unique needs of today's education market. No other product on the market delivers the range of features and performance than I-Gear provides on the Sun platform.

With the new centralized Sun and I-Gear solution, Surrey can manage and administer Internet use and access at the district level. "The Sun and I-Gear system provide filtering and caching for all our Internet needs-for the entire Surrey district," states McLeod.

With I-Gear's state-of-the-art filtering and Sun's commitment to connecting the world's students to the Internet, Surrey's students are now able to access the Internet with a flexible product and the district has the confidence that they can maintain and provide access to the Internet to all learners across the district.

[c]2000 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Ultra, Solaris, and Sun Enterprise are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc., in the United States and other countries. All the other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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