DNSBOX rings Nickerson’s Bell
ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Nickerson-S Hutchinson Unified School District in Kansas USA has chosen DNSBOX to deliver secure and reliable connectivity for thousands of school and student devices.
Demand for internet access at Nickerson has been growing. 1,200 students and several hundred staff use school-owned devices on and off throughout the school day. Having recently added BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) access, it amounted to more than 4,000 active IP connections.
The district was outgrowing its core network solutions. The switch Nickerson used for DCHP couldn’t handle the large volumes of IP lease requests, and the Windows AD server was struggling to handle the thousands of internet (DNS) requests. IT Director Aaron Bell was receiving complaints of connectivity glitches – in some cases, students couldn’t connect, others couldn’t access websites.
Aaron needed to upgrade both DNS and DHCP solutions to effectively handle the district’s current network demand. But with a restrictive school budget, he needed to deliver the best value with the highest impact.
Having searched for options online, he was pleased to find that DNSBOX’s modular design could accommodate both services on a single server. Fully integrated DNS and DHCP not only made the solution ultra-secure and robust, it made the high-performance Aaron sought very affordable.
“For a quarter of the cost of a non-redundant solution from the other DDI vendors, Aaron was able to deploy a redundant pair of DNSBOX200s – one at each of the district’s separate datacentres,” says DNSBOX Product Manager Magdalena Jovanovic. “The district can now provide the rock-solid, high availability network service it needs, with student access safeguarded should either server fail.”
About
Nickerson–South Hutchinson USD 309 is a unified school district in rural South Hutchinson, Kansas USA, made up of 2 elementary schools, 1 middle school, and 1 high school. The district’s commitment to leveraging technology to better serve learning has seen active IP address numbers rise sharply – 3,000 school-owned devices plus a significant number of growing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) mobile phone users request access daily.