When the Joaquin Independent School District (Joaquin ISD) realized their 10/100 infrastructure was no match for the district’s growing network demand, they turned to D-Link to deliver a comprehensive solution for greater functionality and increased campus-wide security. On its two-square-mile campus, the K-12 school district has three campuses, serving upwards of 750 students annually, with a goal to promote educational excellence, in part by providing access to the Internet and computer technology to all students and teachers.
“When I started with Joaquin ISD, there were a lot of issues. Our old mix of switches kept locking up and had to be restarted – almost every day – and they didn’t offer any Layer 2 or Layer 3 features,” said Landon Oliver, technology network administrator and director, Joaquin ISD. “We had no VLANs, no multicasting options and everything was just on one big wide-open network.”
Joaquin ISD’s network needed to support over 800 PCs and about 500 mobile devices, which included a notebook, tablet and personal device for every teacher, as well as student traffic. Since the district was also concerned about security, they wanted to install a full IP Surveillance solution, with security cameras to provide the necessary eyes on the ground.
Joaquin ISD installed a mix of D-Link IP surveillance cameras, networking gear and wireless infrastructure, including the DGS-3120 Series switches which support physical stacking, multicast and enhanced security, making them an ideal Gigabit access layer solution. The district now has Gigabit connections from PC to server and has been able to increase its SAN storage capabilities for fast data transfers of very large files. Since Oliver was unfamiliar with D-Link, he only purchased four switches for his main MDF to start. When he witnessed how well they worked, he started replacing more switches in batches over time and eventually did a whole network flip. Three years later, Joaquin’s ISD’s network has slowly grown into the workhorse it is today – running 80 D-Link switches and D-Link’s full wireless infrastructure with about 80 access points.
After upgrading his core network, Oliver immediately launched a full-scale camera upgrade. D-Link assisted the process by providing a standalone IP camera as a trial. “It was everything I was looking for,” said Oliver. “It had an absolutely gorgeous picture, the bandwidth was low, and it was very price-worthy. Since then, I have slowly been upgrading and I’ve gone from about 80 cameras to about 130 cameras.”
Today, Joaquin ISD’s network supports nearly 800 LAN connections, approximately 400 wireless connections, 170 IP Surveillance cameras, 80 new IP phones, an all-new public Wi-Fi and multiple virtual machines, which have a reputation for hogging bandwidth.
“After I completed our major network upgrade, I was proud that 99.9 percent of my entire network infrastructure was from D-Link,” Oliver added. “There are eight or nine schools in the surrounding area and I’m proud to say that I probably have the strongest network out of everybody. We have one incredible network. It simply doesn’t go down – it always works.”
