SD-WAN GOES BACK TO SCHOOL – A Scholarly Approach to Backup
A Higher Grade of Education
When a prestigious New York City-based charter school system surpassed the limited capacity of their overtaxed and outdated communications network, the consequences were significant. With over 50 K-12 locations, stretching across the five NYC boroughs, the ongoing latency, data loss, and frequent Wi-Fi outages were creating an untenable situation. As the organization prides itself on encouraging excellence in its students and in challenging the same of its faculty and staff, they had to act when the problems began to negatively impact the education and service of their students—or “scholars,” as they proudly refer to them.
The Challenge: Failure Was Not an Option
“The issues went beyond disruptions during web-based lessons, or student research being interrupted,” relates the charter school system’s leader of network and systems, whose team was under great pressure at the time. “The network would often shut down in the middle of online exams. And the lost data packets included test answers students had entered up until that point but weren’t saved by the system. Since that information couldn’t be retrieved, they were forced to restart and retake the exams—and this was heartbreaking” for both the students and the IT team.
The school had various Internet-driven SaaS applications and services running on primary 5G fiber with a 1G backup line. But in that 30-second delay during failover to the secondary connection—between initial signal loss and network re-registering—any open and in-process web sessions, such as lessons and tests, were irrevocably lost. Clearly, for a STEM-based school that consistently leads the state in math and reading, it needed a network upgrade, and fast. The network leader brought the challenge to the team at Skywire Networks.
The Solution: Seamless Failover with Zero Packet Loss
“We wanted a network with seamless failover, and with the same uptime reliability of financial trading floor applications,” recalls the network leader. “The standard was zero data loss, because when it comes to our students, there’s just as much at stake.” After assessing the state of the network, and strategizing a custom approach together with school, the team first deployed Skywire’s flexible and dependable SD-WAN solution with 5G broadband throughput. Then it also deployed Skywire AppAssure as the sub-second failover. SaaS traffic would now originate at Skywire’s SD-WAN gateways; in other words, at Skywire’s own core data centers, and no longer at each individual school. When an inevitable Internet event occurs now, the SD-WAN’s OS instantly and intuitively reroutes traffic down the secondary connection, in real time, and does so completely unbeknownst to the school.
The Result: A Network that Passes with Flying Colors
The school’s network now has the robust, dependable backup diversity that reflects its own educational mission: to inspire their “scholars” to perform at their best. “Today, outages are so invisible to us, we don’t know when, or even if, they occur” says the network leader. Then he quickly adds, “We only learn about it through Skywire alerts.”
In addition, the school’s demand for speed, flexibility, and responsive deployment also set a pretty high bar. However, working together as one team, this difficult mission was accomplished. We deployed 48 schools during the Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday breaks,” retells the network leader, “avoiding disruption to classes. By the time students got back to school, our new network was up and running.”
Today, the primary goal for school’s leader of networks and systems is once again being achieved. “Our network is back to operating at a level of excellence that we encourage our scholars to achieve.”
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