New Skyward | Turbo Skyward

At the end of last week we migrated our Skyward Server to a new physical server.   Our old server had ran quite well with no problems for four years and was quick and snappy with 48 gigs of DDR3 Ram and Dual Xeon processors with 16 logical cores running at 2.4 ghz.  Our new server is the best piece of hardware I have personally ever setup and installed.  This server has Dual Xeon (i7 family) process with 10 cores each that are hyperthreaded for 40 logical cores (20 actual) running at 2.6ghz per core.    The new Dell PowerEdge R730 Server has 64 gigs of DD4 Ram and runs a RAID 10 with 8 Solid State Enterprise level Intel Drives.  It is connected to our LAN with a Intel fiber NIC  operating at 10GB (10000mbps).  The idea with this server is quite simple,  four more years of fast, stable uninterrupted access to our Student and Financial Management System.

This is one of the few pieces of equipment that has not been migrated to offsite cloud hosting because it is simply faster and more economical to keep it local.¬†¬† For the price of this one server, it would costs us approximately 3 months of cloud managed storage.¬†¬† Since this server will easily run 4 years¬† and will run a factor 4-5 times faster locally it doesn’t make sense to have hosted off site (yet).¬† Our District’s network is essentially one large LAN with each building connected together via fiber optic cabling.¬† This backbone of our LAN connecting each building together runs at 10GB (10000mbps).¬† With our local Skyward server running with these specs the latency for our clients in and out of network is extremely low.¬† In fact I may go as far to say I don’t know of another Skyward installation that runs at this speed (sure there is one somewhere, I just haven’t seen it).

Our skyward configuration will soon have its database optimized for its new hardware and will gain yet again another speed boost.  Overall the switch over to the new hardware went relatively smooth with only a couple of minor hiccups.  The majority of our teachers, students and staff are probably not even aware it happened.   Want to give a shout out and props to Dell, and its PowerEdge line of Servers.  Working with IT for now over 9 years here in Geneseo none of our servers from Dell have physically failed.  Older  servers from before my time Pentium 3 based have all been retired but were retired in still working condition which is a testament to quality.