IBM Power makes the grade at Manatee schools

The motto at the Manatee County School District is “inspiring our students to learn, dream and achieve.” But with more than 42,000 students and over 5,300 full-time employees at 34 elementary schools, 11 middle schools and eight high schools, such a goal can be a massive undertaking.

Just ask David Lesnek, manager of systems and programming for the school district located just south of Tampa Bay, FL. “We have many lines of business we have to support, from building schools, purchasing, payroll and vehicle maintenance to, of course, teaching students,” Lesnek says. “We support a lot of different services here.”

Transitioning from green screen to web browser

One of these key services is the Student Information System (SIS). This specialized software manages many aspects of academia, from grades and schedules to disciplinary records and other administrative functions. And for years, Manatee and many other school districts in Florida relied on a Cobol-based “green screen” command-line system.

But over time, this legacy application was starting to show its age. “We’d hire young folks and they’d sit in front of those green screens and say ‘What is this?’” recalls Ernie Paredes, Manatee’s coordinator of program development. “We needed a graphical interface to more efficiently provide information to users.”

Although a more advanced SIS was a top priority for the school district’s five-year modernization strategy, there were some key requirements that had to be met with any new solution. Most importantly, it had to function with the school district’s existing operating environment—which already included an IBM Power 5, IBM i operating system and IBM DB2® for i software—in order to retain the district’s investment in IBM i technology and programming staff.

“You can’t buy the knowledge and experience that our staff has, so leaving the IBM i platform was not an option,” explains Paredes.

A collaborative approach to achieve goals

During the search for a replacement SIS that could function within Manatee’s IT environment, Paredes came across Focus School Software, a Florida-based provider of SIS solutions that operate through a web interface.

The Focus SIS solution met all of the district’s needs but one—it had not been programmed to run on the IBM i platform. With IBM Premier Business Partner Premise, Inc. serving as a liaison between Manatee school district and Focus, a version of the program was developed for IBM i in just two hours.

With the software hurdle cleared, Manatee County School District next needed a new server with the processing power to run more advanced web-based programs and the scalability to eventually deliver these web services to tens of thousands of teachers, administrators and parents.

“Focus worked so well, but we knew we needed to move into a bigger, better, faster unit,” says Lesnek. “And from a cost perspective, I also wanted to have continuity with our financial package, Oracle JD Edwards, which also runs on the i.”

Delivering on the future with IBM Power solutions

The school district’s longstanding reliance on IBM solutions was reaffirmed after stress tests on HP servers fell short of the performance obtained on an IBM Power 740 Express. “IBM came out far better,” recalls Paredes.

Manatee’s solution includes a single IBM Power 740 Express server with four IBM POWER7® processors. On the production side, 114 gigabytes has been allocated for the Focus SIS, as well as the Oracle JD Edwards and other district applications. A second 10-gigabyte guest partition is solely dedicated to running a Linux utility called Memcache, which Paredes says significantly boosts the performance of Focus SIS.

“The Power system is the heart of our district,” adds Paredes. “Our HR, payroll, utility billing, financial and student systems—everything resides in there.”

Smooth implementation leads to substantial benefits

Data and applications were backed up from the previous Power 5 server and then restored onto the Power 740 Express in one weekend.

“We had no interruption of service to our staff and internal customers,” says Lesnek. “And the performance on the server is amazing. It’s just incredible what it can do.”

The benefits of the Power 740 Express have been noted in ways both big and small. On the server side, Lesnek has cut the time it takes to perform system backups in half, from one hour to 30 minutes, and nightly batch processing jobs take two hours instead of four. The server also takes up half as much physical space in the data center.

In addition to raw hardware performance, the IBM solution provides a solid foundation for the Focus School SIS in terms of scalability and availability. While it is currently only accessible to a few thousand administrators and teachers, SIS will eventually expand to more than 40,000 parents.

“We’re going to have a lot of individuals accessing this, looking at student information, from teachers, to school staff, to district-level curriculum and instructional staff looking at how students are doing,” says Lesnek. “The Power 740 Express gives us a very solid and reliable platform to scale up in one footprint.”

Manatee has long enjoyed the benefits of hardware support and software maintenance support from IBM Global Technology Services. So much so, in fact, the district has signed a five-year software and hardware maintenance contract with IBM for the new solution. Lesnek says the combined effort which brought the Focus School SIS to the IBM i platform, as well as the implementation of the Power 740 Express, gives the school district everything it needs moving forward to help meet its goal of inspiring students to learn, dream and achieve.

“The willingness of Premise and Focus to work with us and apply their knowledge and their expertise to this implementation were vital in getting us to where we are today,” says Lesnek. “And I see a continued long-term relationship with IBM. It was an excellent experience.”

For more information

Contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at: ibm.com/systems/power

For more information about Manatee County School District, visit: www.manatee.k12.fl.us

For more information about Premise Inc., visit: www.premiseinc.com

For more information about Focus School Software, visit: focus-sis.org