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District IT reports 99.97% uptime and outlines network monitoring, redundancy and security work
Summary
Danville Area SD IT staff reported about 99.97% network uptime over the past months, described monitoring and redundancy practices, and said online testing (PSSA) and other critical services drive the need for high availability.
Danville Area School District’s information-technology staff reported Wednesday that the district’s network has averaged roughly 99.97% uptime over the past five years and outlined steps taken to preserve availability and security as demand for online testing and classroom services grows.
IT director Ryan (identified in the meeting as the district’s technology lead) told the board that last month monitoring polled roughly 100 devices continuously and logged a 99.97% availability figure, with approximately 280 polling losses out of millions of checks. He said day-to-day daytime availability is higher and credited in-house redundancy, 24/7 monitoring, scheduled maintenance windows and planned capacity upgrades for the performance.
Ryan described district practices including network segmentation (separating student, staff and guest traffic), wireless channel management, intrusion prevention (including automatic detection and shutdown of rogue hotspots), and throttling to prevent single clients from consuming excessive bandwidth. He said the district plans to pursue link aggregation and multi-ISP failover when contracts are renegotiated to support load balancing and automatic failover.
Why it matters: this school year all PSSA testing will be delivered online, increasing the importance of reliable network performance for assessments and daily operations.
Ryan told the board the district is rolling out an EMR (MediSprout) for mental-health providers and that IT will support that implementation; he also said the district publishes availability and analytics dashboards publicly to aid transparency. Board members thanked IT staff for the reliability metrics and applauded the proactive approach to monitoring and security.
Quoted from the meeting: "We've averaged 99.97 percent 24/7 over the past 5 years," Ryan said, adding that the district has a "proactive approach" consisting of redundancy, continuous monitoring and capacity planning.
The board did not take action on the IT report; administration said planned upgrades and training will continue in the coming months.
