School district saves with VoIP, open source

The Saugus Union School District reached the Network World Renovator Award finals for a wide-ranging network overhaul that involved laying a foundation of 100/1000M bit/sec Ethernet, installing IP-based telephony, delivering on-demand video and migrating 50 servers from Novell NetWare to Red Hat Linux.

Saugus Union's network revamp project started with the school's network team creeping around in wiring closets and wiring ducts in the 16 elementary, middle and high schools, and ripping out old network gear.

"We had some ancient stuff," says Jim Klein, director of information services and technology for the school district in California.

Klein's goal, when the project began two years ago, was a converged voice, video and data network that could be centrally managed and monitored.

The first step was taking out 10-year-old Bay Network 10Base-T hubs and various 10Base-2 coaxial cable links that tied together some school buildings. The 128K bit/sec ISDN-based WAN also had to go, he says.

Klein built the foundation of the school's new multi-service network on Fast and Gigabit Ethernet switches from 3Com: Switch 4900s in the core of each building fanning out to SuperStack 3 switches in wiring closets. Whereas network problems used to require trips to the trouble sites, the 3Com gear let Klein manage the network from his office.

The school also upgraded its WAN with point-to-point T-1 lines anchored by Cisco routers.

With the foundation in place, Klein could next tackle delivering VoIP. In the past, the school only had phones in certain administrative offices, he says. The network renovation plan called for putting a 3Com IP phone in each room and tying together all schools with free IP calling over the WAN.

But the project got tricky because telephony traffic had to run through firewalls using network address translation (NAT). The 3Com phones use Layer 2 media access control addresses to route calls over the LAN; IP addresses are picked up from a DHCP server on the 3Com NBX servers when routed over an IP WAN. When they hit the NAT wall, calls dropped because the IP addresses of the phones were changed, Klein says.

To get around the problem, Klein configured his 3Com switches to route the calls over the point-to-point T-1 links, bypassing the firewalls.

The VoIP network also eliminated dozens of disparate telephone key systems and several Centrex lines. Now calls within the district are free, and Klein estimates this saves hundreds of dollars a month in toll charges alone.

But the biggest payoff stemmed from the school district's migration from NetWare servers to Linux.

"We were able to cut our server maintenance costs by $50,000 per year," Klein says. He now pays $50 per server, per year for software updates, patches and support, vs. $1,000 per server, per year with Novell.

Converting the school's applications from NetWare to Linux was uncomplicated because the major software vendors were migrating to Linux, he says. The fact that Novell now supports Linux also made it easier, which let the district keep its Novell GroupWise e-mail system.