Education All-Stars

Education must secure a highly PC-literate and demanding user base while supporting bandwidth-hungry learning applications and a free flow of ideas. These challenges make the seven Enterprise All-Star projects chock-full of great connectivity initiatives and cutting-edge security strategies.

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An IDEAL education

Arizona State University gets an A+ for building a unique portal that promises sweeping educational change.

Introduction WINNERS BY INDUSTRY Education | Financial services | Government | Healthcare | Manufacturing | Transportation | Hospitality | More WINNERS BY TECHNOLOGY Applications | Convergence | E-commerce | Management | Security | Servers | Storage | WAN | Wireless Download complete list of winners John Gallant on being an All-Star

When 3-year-old Elias Hinojosa goes to kindergarten in Tucson, Ariz., he'll have more than crayons, paper and paste at his disposal. He'll also have access to a host of interactive educational tools, thanks to a state-sponsored Web portal built and managed by Arizona State University.

From kindergarten through 12th grade, Hinojosa will head to the Integrated Data to Enhance Arizona's Learning (IDEAL) portal for math and reading practice tests, supplemental online courses, interactive learning exercises and state-required advanced-placement tests. He'll also turn to IDEAL for learning materials, coursework and video resources his teachers have placed there to supplement their classroom presentations.

Ultimately, Hinojosa and as many as 1 million other students will have access to the IDEAL portal, enabled with the open source uPortal software. For now, 300,000 students are authorized to log on to IDEAL to check out sample tests; coursework is not yet available but will be soon.

In addition to the students, the state's 60,000 K-12 teachers have access to the portal, not only to provide supplemental coursework but also for links to student demographics, improvement guidelines, grades and benchmarks. Teachers manage coursework on IDEAL through Sakai, an open source course management and collaboration application.

The focus of this innovative educational initiative is to use technology to enable lifelong learning, says Sam DiGangi, assistant vice provost for IT at Arizona State University (ASU), in Tempe. "IDEAL is not just access to a Web site, but accounts that will stay with students through their schooling and, conceivably, their entire career," he says.

ASU is building the IDEAL network per a contract with the Arizona Department of Education, which has invested $5 million in the network. ASU contributes technical and staffing resources. The university is phasing in access on a rolling basis, with all students expected to have authority to use the portal by next August.

Arizona State’s All-Star project leaders Jack Hsu (left) and Sam DiGangi

For its leadership role in this groundbreaking K-12 learning network, ASU earns recognition as a 2005 Enterprise All-Star.

The IDEAL network

With more than 1 million potential users, IDEAL necessitates a heavy-duty storage infrastructure. At the heart of that infrastructure are two Network Appliance FAS3020 file servers, each hosting 7T bytes of structured and unstructured data. An open source MySQL database, which runs on two Sun Fire v40z servers, hosts the IDEAL data repository. The NetApp file servers and Sun database servers connect via ASU's Gigabit Ethernet network, to which the filers connect using iSCSI. ASU hosts the IDEAL application servers and portal software on five Linux-based IBM xSeries 336 servers, and relies on switches from Cisco and F5 Networks for load balancing and network connectivity.