Schools improve bandwidth: students have fast, reliable Internet access, thanks to a...

The Spokane Public School District in Spokane, Wash., leverages the public network in many ways, including hosting an Internet site with district and school information for teachers, parents and employees, while providing Internet access to the outside world for 30,000-plus students. Each K-12

The popularity and reach of the network was a double-edged sword, however. Parents, teachers, students and employees were all accessing the system--but they were also accessing it at generally the same hours of the day, causing bandwidth saturation and slowing performance for everyone.

"You could see our utilization (of the Internet) go from almost nothing at 8:30 in the morning to ramping up to 6 Mbps, where it would hover until school let out," says Dennis Schweikhardt, communications and infrastructure manager for the district. "We needed to increase capacity. We also wanted to provide high availability and failover, as well--if the ISP is down, we're down."

The district's facilities include 35 elementary schools, six middle schools, five high schools, four special schools and 12 support buildings on 544 acres. The district has 4,000 full-time employees and operations linked by nearly 15,000 computers.

Schweikhardt wanted the best technology to ensure that site traffic was directed over the best possible link and ISP. He also sought to maintain the highest Internet quality, service and speed for students, parents and teachers, reduce bandwidth costs, and eliminate the deployment barriers and costs of multihoming via border gateway protocol.

"From a communication standpoint, uptime is job number one," states Schweikhardt. "We rely on our infrastructure so much that, if you bring down a site, you bring down the applications others rely upon, as well as impacting tens of thousands of kids relying on the Internet to get the information they need."

The district looked at increasing bandwidth by going to a multihoming type of scenario--essentially bringing in a second pipe from another carrier. Multihoming means that a site has more than one WAN link or access gateway to the Internet. This establishes another path for traffic to flow in and out of the data center in the event that one link fails.

Initially, the district looked at a BGP (border gateway patrol) solution to meet its multihoming requirements. While BGP is a core technology for routing IP packets through the Internet, it was not well suited for this particular task.

"There were issues with BGP, in the sense that it wasn't as granular as we'd like; we couldn't control our traffic the way we wanted," says Schweikhardt. "It also had a fairly steep learning curve."

In order to build along-term multihoming solution and to address its traffic-management issues, the district chose the BIG-IP Link Controller from F5 Networks. The integrated load-balancing product replaces legacy routing protocols with faster, more flexible intelligent switching technology. Deployed between firewalls and routers, the product regularly measures the health and capacity of each connection. Bandwidth, performance and health of ISPs were automatically measured; each user is then directed down the best possible link.

Schweikhardt oversaw the deployment of the solution, which was designed to manage both incoming and outgoing site traffic, and to direct users over the best link.

"We brought in the Link Controller, tested the failover, and tested the ability to modify its balancing algorithms based on cost," says Schweikhardt. "In every case, it did everything we wanted it to do.

"In addition to increasing our bandwidth, and adding failover, we also wanted to deploy a caching solution," he adds. "A kid in a third grade class at one school will likely go to a similar site as another kid in another class. We knew we could cache those pages and save on bandwidth usage. Link Controller integrated easily with our caching product."

According to Schweikhardt, the product provided immediate benefits, including bandwidth that solved the district's bandwidth scalability problems; high availability to assure users stayed connected through immediate ISP failover; improved performance by directing users across the fastest link to avoid congested bandwidth; reduced management and support by providing a simplified multihoming architecture; and more productive users-complaints about site response time completely disappeared.

The overriding goal, however, was to increase bandwidth capacity with more intelligent use of that bandwidth.

"Link Controller let us see into our bandwidth usage and control it better," says Schweikhardt. "The thing that really makes a big difference to us is not only the disaster recovery capability, but also the fact that we can control things ourselves-the flexibility of adding bandwidth is now almost instantaneous. If we want to change our rate plan, for example, I can just call them (the ISP) and it just happens. We can control how much we use, and limit it. We're also no longer getting complaints about response time from end-users.

"It's seamless, it's invisible, it was easy to set up and the ISPs don't have to get involved in any way, shape or form," he adds. "And by having the cache integrated, as well, and having the failover ability, we don't have the ISP service outages anymore."

For more information from F5 Networks: www.rsleads.com/501cn-254