Raytown Quality School District

Challenge

The network management group at Raytown Quality School District relied on a conglomerate of tools to maintain the network backbone. Managing multiple tools was time consuming and required the use of manpower to learn the tools, manage them, and try to make sense of the disparate data provided by each tool. They needed a way to simplify the management of the network and spend the time saved on more productive tasks.

Solution

Yellow Dog Networks has been a long-time trusted network consultant for the Raytown School District. They suggested Infoblox as the solution for network compliance, analysis and discovery for the school district.

NetMRI was chosen as the proactive network management solution, to manage its vast multi-vendor network as one whole system. With its built-in expert rules engine, NetMRI monitors, detects, and reports on network issues before they become problems for Raytown’s IT staff. After installing NetMRI, Raytown Quality School District was able to replace most of its monitoring tools, resulting in an enormous reduction in overall network management and maintenance time. This dramatic reduction enables the network group to be proactive instead of reactive.

Infoblox allowed the integration of feature sets as well as expandability of the system. “We were able to choose the components we wanted immediately and plan for future expansion of the system,” said Tebbenkamp.

NetMRI also makes configuration modification of devices on the network simple and hassle free. It formalizes Raytown Quality School District’s best practices before the IT staff rolls out new pieces of equipment. NetMRI also maintains copies of current and previous configurations, which enables the network group to revert to an earlier configuration at any time.

Summary

Overall, NetMRI has greatly simplified and streamlined Raytown Quality School Districts’ overall network management, which enables the network engineering staff to work more efficiently. It simplifies everything by providing the school district with one solution that unifies control of key aspects of its infrastructure. Most importantly, the network group now has the time to proactively manage the network, rather than consecutively running multiple tools.

“Infoblox NetMRI is very easy to install and simply understands how the internal network infrastructure works. It is truly a unique solution and I haven’t found another product that is able to carry out the functions and tasks that it performs,” said Tebbenkamp.