Supporting High-Tech Education Across Oklahoma
Customer: Mike Pennell, Executive Director
Company: NewNet 66
Location: Claremore, Oklahoma
Business: Inter-local consortium that provides networking services to schools across Oklahoma
InterMapper's Role: monitors over 150 devices that bring internet connectivity and distance learning to member schools
Quote: “I wouldn't do this job if I didn't have InterMapper.”
NewNet 66 is a non-profit inter-local consortium that provides networking services to schools across the state of Oklahoma. “Inter-local consortium means that we play by the same rules as the schools we serve,” explains Mike Pennell, NewNet 66's Executive Director. NewNet 66 is governed by a Board that's made up of representatives from member districts or individual schools. NewNet 66 provides internet connectivity, distance learning bandwidth, content filtering, network design consulting, network security, and network monitoring to 77 Oklahoma School Districts representing over 50,000 students and 4,900 staff members.
Many NewNet 66 schools are rural; one particularly remote school has 8 teachers, 80 students, and no IT person on staff. Other schools have hundreds of students. Rural or not, member schools use H.323, streaming video for distance education, and other network intensive media in classes so connections have to be available and reliable.
NewNet 66 runs InterMapper from its operations center in Claremore. Installed on a high-end Mac, InterMapper watches telco connections, internet connections, and managed switches across the state. “We monitor switches right down to the port,” says Pennell. Since NewNet 66 staff is rarely in the operations center, they use InterMapper RemoteAccess to access maps and reports.
“InterMapper checks devices every 60 seconds,” explains Pennell. “If there's a problem that requires an alert, InterMapper waits 60 seconds to make sure the problem persists and then alerts us. That means we know about a problem 2 minutes or so after InterMapper finds it. We call the school right away and, in many cases, the school doesn't even know that a server is down. The home run is that we're proactive.”
According to Pennell, giving schools early warning on problems is one of the biggest services NewNet 66 provides. Problems are almost always fixed in time to preserve lesson plans and keep classes on schedule. “If there's a problem with a server, someone at the school can get right on it. If the problem is at the telco end, we'll call them to get things fixed.”
InterMapper has also been instrumental in identifying hack attempts. Schools are especially worried about losing confidential student records to unauthorized individuals. Since the State Department of Education requires schools to transmit records from the district to the state offices, most schools have dedicated a server to student data. On five occasions, InterMapper has alerted NewNet 66 to high levels of outgoing traffic from a student record server during off-hours. “It's very rare to see a high rate of outgoing traffic from a school,” explains Pennell. “Most traffic is inbound. So we've set InterMapper to alert when traffic is over 40% outbound. When it's that high, and its 2:00 in the morning, we can tell that something's up.”
“I wouldn't do this job if it wasn't for InterMapper,” says Pennell. He's looked at other monitoring products but hasn't found one that matches InterMapper's value proposition. “We had a school district that didn't know what they had or where it was,” he recalls. “The quotes they got from other companies to come in and map their network were between $15,000 and $26,000. We walked in with InterMapper, plugged it in, and found gear they didn't know they had in a couple of hours. They bought their own copy of InterMapper. That and our time didn't come anywhere close to $15,000.”
Though Pennell has called Dartware tech support for help only once in his ten years as an InterMapper user, he gives the company high marks for customer service. “I do know other users and I've been in touch with Dartware. Support is awesome. They really care. I work with lots of vendors, big companies like Cisco, and nobody even comes close.”