Who?
Hosting
services are currently being provided at the MCOECN’s (Management Council of
Ohio Education Computer Network) on equipment owned by the MCOECN. The
equipment is housed in leased space of a commercial data center facility in
Westerville, Ohio that meets requirements listed below in the secure
infrastructure data center area. The current wide area network
(WAN) infrastructure and Internet access is a redundant, 10 gigabits per second
connection to OARnet’s Ohio K-12 network provided by the MCOECN. Software
Answers will monitor, manage, and support the software.
What?
Hosting
services provided by Software Answers includes:
=
24/7 Monitoring of server, network operations and ProgressBook Software.
=
Maintenance, upgrades to hardware, operating system, database,
ProgressBook software and troubleshooting as needed.
=
Administration, Service availability 99.95%, 24x7x365 days excluding
scheduled maintenance, facility outage, and network outage.
=
Backup and Restoration services
=
Support with service level agreements (SLA)
Secure
infrastructure data center with:
=
24/7 monitored interior and exterior security and surveillance
=
SSAE 6 Certified
=
N+1 onsite redundant generators
=
N+1 redundant UPS distribution
=
Diverse power substations connections
=
N+1 HVAC system
=
Multiple and diverse, dedicated fiber optic Internet connections
Why?
=
LACA will be the 7th ITCs to move to the MCOECN provided
environment managed by Software Answers.
=
The Hosting environment will limit down time, slowness
issues. We expect the ProgressBook Suite to be accessible more,
performance to be greatly improved, problems to be minimized, and when needed,
troubleshooting time to be reduced.
=
LACA gave a great deal of thought to this decision. We feel that
this is the best option for provide the best possible performance of the
ProgressBook Suite for our school districts.
When
=
LACA will begin testing the environment using a copy of all of our data
in the middle of March.
=
Once testing is completed and we are satisfied with the performance, we
will make a decision regarding an upcoming weekend (APRIL 20th) for
the switch over. We will give you as much advance notice as possible and
will take into account reporting periods, EMIS items and other to determine an
appropriate time. We want to have this completed this school year rather
than wait for the start of the school year!
=
The switchover would be completed over a long weekend. We
anticipate that the change will be transparent for you with the exception of
needing to utilize a new URL or link to the software.
Please let us know if you have any issues, comments or
questions!