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Leave it to the schools to teach the world about converged networks. While many an industry pundit has declared the task unworkable, a K-12 school district in Oklahoma is proving it can be done, and done now.
Western Heights School District in Oklahoma City has spent the last five years and $8 million in E-rate and bond money building "JetNet" - its aptly named converged Gigabit Ethernet backbone that does it all: voice, videoconferencing and video broadcasting, as well as storage-area networking.
 "We think of technology as something that helps us teach, but technology itself is a basic skill. We've got to keep the best technology in place at all times so our students can learn it," explains Joe Kitchens, the district's superintendent and network visionary.
Still, Kitchens didn't launch this project intending to build one of the nation's most advanced end-user networks. His goal was to develop better teaching methods. In 1994, two years before the district would begin to deploy JetNet, Kitchens commandeered a 24-member committee to examine how technology could help educators. That committee, comprising teachers, administrators, students, parents and local businesses interested in the eventual talent pool, came up with a list of goals. Top on the list was putting several computers in every classroom.
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Quick Look
WESTERN HEIGHTS
SCHOOL DISTRICT
Primary business: K-12 education.
Project name: JetNet
Business case: A converged network lets the district support video and
distance learning on the same fiber with which they access the Internet and e-mail services, make telephone calls and run data applications.
Cost: $8 million
Benefits: Lets students learn by their own methods while teaching about
technology.
NOTABLE FACT
The 3,500 users supported by JetNet access 60,000 to 70,000 Web pages per day.
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| "In any given class of 20 to 30 kids, there are four or five different learning styles. We imagined kids coming in and sitting down at a computer and getting information in the manner that helps them the most," explains Daryl McDaniel, information technology coordinator for Western Heights, who with a staff of four and three outside consultants built and maintains JetNet. Those who learn through audio would have multimedia. Those who learn best through repetition would have a tireless companion to perform the same task a multitude of times, and so on.
Moreover, the committee envisioned PCs functioning as teachers' aids, offering supplemental lessons tailored to students' developmental stages. For grade-school children, who are "dependent learners" - meaning they need someone to show them what to do - Western Heights wanted video lessons. For junior high and high school students, who are working toward becoming "independent learners," district leaders wanted a wider variety of independently paced lessons, supplemented with video when needed.
But the meager network Western Heights had could not support these lofty goals. Before JetNet, Western Heights had two small networks that connected 10 computers, mostly Apple IIe machines used by administrators. Teachers and students used another handful of stand-alone Apples.
By 1995, committee members realized that the first step toward meeting the technology goal was to wire every site. They wanted five network connections for each classroom, plus a computer lab for each school.
"The computer lab was mostly for mass training of teachers. They needed to be brought up to speed - 80% had absolutely no training at all on computers, so we concentrated on the labs first," Kitchens explains.
Also at that time, Kitchens set about learning more about networking. His inspiration for building a single network for data, voice and video came while listening to Intel Chairman Andy Grove preach convergence at a technology conference. Although the rest of the world raised skeptical eyebrows that have yet to be dropped, Kitchens says he vowed then not to do anything until convergence materialized.
He was convinced that convergence was the future. By investing in one set of wires, the district could build a data and voice network simultaneously.
With convergence as a guiding goal, Western Heights took the practical step of hiring three consultants. One was a telecom engineer who knew wiring specifications. Another was an architect who helped retrofit each building to accommodate the wiring and the computer labs. The third was an emerging-technology specialist who explained what could be done immediately, and how to plan for new technology as it became available.
Until 1996, JetNet was a 100M bit/ sec Ethernet wiring project - with community backing. Voters approved a $4.5 million bond in 1995 that was dedicated to implementing this basic infrastructure, Kitchens says.
The next wrinkle was laying the fiber among its eight campuses. The district didn't have all the necessary property rights. So it struck an agreement with the local power company, Oklahoma Gas and Electric. In exchange for letting Western Heights use its easements for fiber, the utility company shares the bandwidth.
Through this agreement, the district interconnected five sites with self-supporting single-mode fiber, suspended on utility poles. The remaining three sites were adjacent to each other, allowing the district to bury multimode fiber on land it owns.
Over the course of three years, the community would pass two more bond issues for JetNet, for a total of $6.8 million in funds. An additional $250,000 came in federal funds, and another $1 million was raised by the FCC-regulated E-rate program. (A fourth bond issue, which would allocate another $1.2 million to JetNet, hit the ballots in October. With the matching E-rate money that such a bond would allow Western Heights to pursue, JetNet's projected budget to date is $10 million.)
By 1997, the year-old JetNet was the district's portal to the world, linking up with the state's Internet connection. By 1998, it began to host the video its architects dreamed of four years earlier. And in 1999, with the installation of a storage-area network (SAN) and a gateway that allows phone calls to be generated from teachers' PCs, JetNet was a truly converged network.
Today, JetNet is a gigabit backbone that connects the eight sites over 17 miles using fiber optic cable that terminates at the main campus. From there, JetNet connects to OneNet, an OC-48 backbone that links Oklahoma's educational and government agencies to the 'Net. This connection has let students and faculty use the Web for research and to build their own Web sites.
JetNet supports 3,500 end users with 1,470 desktop computers and 30 Dell PowerEdge servers. A handful of these servers are dedicated to authentication, network management and
e-mail. The rest are clustered to handle the district's advanced video needs, some fielding satellite feeds. JetNet communications are handled by Intel Gigabit Ethernet switches; the district has been beta testing the company's 6000 Series Switch.
Also, a central Dell SAN will be tapped for streaming video. The district is acquiring and filming its own video lessons - with this SAN, it can offer 40 to 50 video lessons per class, at 20G to 25G bytes of storage for each lesson. Teachers already have more than 2,000 hours of stored video to choose from, "with room to grow," McDaniel says.
In fact, McDaniel worked with Dell to create a RAID Level 5 SAN design that could cluster and scale with hot-swappable disks over a 4G bit/sec uplink to the network. The result is a SAN that creates nine logical unit numbers (LUN) with nine global hotswappable spare drives that can service any LUN inside the SAN, McDaniel says.
"Each video server can only pull from one drive, so we have combined the LUNs to create four volumes. Thus each server has its own 'drive' from which to pull video. When Dell supports RAID Level 3 . . . Western Heights need only make a few minor changes to its current disk usage to be compliant," he explains.
Every classroom has five Category 5, 100M bit/sec Ethernet connections. While not every drop is filled today, Western Heights plans to have 2,200 PCs total, to serve 3,300 students, 230 teachers and 15 administrators.
Each class also has at least two PCs running Windows NT 4.0 - one is a dedicated teacher's workstation - and a 27-inch television, which connects to the network for video broadcasting.
Teacher's PCs are equipped with Intel's ProShare 5.1 videoconferencing software and Cisco's IPTV client, so they can conduct live confer-
ences with other ProShare-equipped machines and stream video over the LAN. Videoconferencing over the 'Net requires ProShare with Videoserver Encounter NetGate; classes can be videoconferenced to as many as 28 end points. Western Heights conducts three videoconference classes daily between the middle school and high school. Both schools have labs with ProShare PCs.
"We eventually see our students on cable modems, able to do videoconferencing, reviewing lessons at home at night, doing make-up classes and accelerated classes. Schools have got to become more flexible and move to become 24-hour institutions. They can't just be the six- to eight-hour institutions they've been," Kitchens says.
Teachers can also use their PCs to place outbound voice calls to any phone. This is supported via ProShare, two ISDN Primary Rate Interface lines, Cisco's 3600 series multiconference server along with Cisco's AS5300 access server.
"ProShare is set up to register itself with the 3600 router. This allows teachers to place a call by dialing the person's e-mail address instead of having to know the NetBIOS name of the person's computer," McDaniel explains.
The multiconference server also is programmed to recognize POTS calls and to redirect such calls to the AS5300. The AS5300 then dials the call over one of the 46 phone lines provided by the two PRI connections. Next, the district plans to integrate inbound calls and voice mail onto JetNet, as soon as its conferencing system vendors can accommodate that feature.
While it's hard to measure how such a network has increased teaching effectiveness, Kitchens says that national test scores are on the rise for the district, in part because of JetNet. "I could not say that the gain is attributable only to technology. But we do know that our students are leaving this school system better prepared to deal with technology," he says.
As Western Heights graduates onto its next network goals, one thing's for certain: In its willingness to venture onto the jagged cliff edge of technology, it mentors us all.
Related links
Other 1999 winners:
Oklahoma City's Western Heights School District Web site
See last year's winners
Storage vendors bolster net connections
Network World, 11/08/99
Cisco jumps into videoconferencing, enhances streaming products
Network World, 10/29/99
Gigabit Ethernet MANs: Where the real action is
Network World, 10/04/99
Switch vendors pass interoperability tests
We put Gigabit Ethernet switches from seven vendors through their paces. Network World, 09/13/99
FCC boosts E-rate spending
Network World, 05/31/99
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