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District technology leaders outline redundancy strategy, caution against full power/internet duplication costs
Summary
Indian Prairie CUSD 204 technology staff gave a spring update describing the district’s network topology, cloud migration, and options and costs for greater power and internet redundancy; presenters said fully redundant generators and separate fiber paths would be costly and may not be cost-effective for rare outages.
District technology leaders presented a spring update to the Indian Prairie CUSD 204 Board of Education on April 7, 2025 describing the district’s network setup, cloud migration of services and a cost-benefit analysis for increased power and internet redundancy.
Presenters — identified in the meeting as Rodney Mack, William Gray and Brian Grinstead — said about 80–90% of district services have moved to cloud-based platforms, making reliable internet and power the principal dependencies for daily operations. The district operates two 10-gig internet “pipes” and segments buildings so that half of the facilities use one pipe and half use the other; automatic failover is configured so that traffic reroutes in seconds if a link fails.
Staff explained which systems remain on-site — file shares, transportation software, security cameras, door access controls and building intercoms — and said work is underway to migrate additional services (for example, file storage and the transportation server) to cloud services where feasible.
Technology staff reviewed the major failure modes: (1) loss of an Internet service provider in a building, which can be temporarily mitigated with hot spots and soft-phone apps; and (2) power loss, which shuts switches and phones unless buildings have UPS units and generator connections. They said the district’s primary data centers are on generators and UPS systems, but many individual MDF/IDF closets and buildings do not have full generator-backed power for network equipment.
Presenters gave high-level cost estimates for full redundancy: installing UPS units across closets and adding backup generators at all buildings would be expensive (presenters cited seven-figure figures for UPS systems and multi-million-dollar estimates for generator installation and annual maintenance). Staff said some outages historically have lasted minutes and that full district-wide redundancy to guard against rare, multi-hour outages would be expensive relative to the frequency and duration of outages experienced.
Board members asked about phones during power outages, the potential to move additional services to the cloud, and the security implications for keeping systems like cameras and access controls on-site. Technology staff said soft-phone apps can allow administrators to receive district calls on cell phones when internet connectivity is available, but the physical desk phones rely on powered switches in the building. Staff also said security cameras are likely to remain on-site because of bandwidth and storage needs and because a power outage would affect any cloud-hosted recording unless the camera systems had local backup power.
Presenters described next steps including continuing migration of select services to cloud platforms, coordinating generator/UPS work with facilities projects to avoid duplicated spending, and training administrators and building staff in emergency communication tools and practices.
