Micro Focus
Lord Selkirk School Division

Lord Selkirk School Division
Success Story

Lord Selkirk School Division celebrates the heritage and culture of Manitoba’s Interlake Region in its schools. In addition to the standard curriculum, it offers a variety of unique courses and programs. Aboriginal Studies, an English-Ukrainian program, a French immersion primary school, and a program for at-risk youth are just a few examples. The division obviously supports its diverse communities. Using our technology, the school network supports diverse platforms and workstations as well.

"The old Mac servers weren’t cutting it anymore. We needed enterprise-level networking for our Mac users, and Apple couldn’t provide it."

BRAD BOWMAN
Network Systems Administrator
Lord Selkirk School Division

At a Glance

Industry

Education

Location

Canada

Results

  • Integrates more than 500 Mac workstations into the school’s existing infrastructure
  • Gives students a seamless computing experience and reliable backups
  • Provides affordable storage, virtualization and other network resources to diverse clients

Overview

Brad Bowman is the network systems administrator for Lord Selkirk School Division, headquartered in Selkirk, Manitoba. In 2006, he made the decision to dump the Mac servers that were running in parallel with his PC storage hardware and use a new solution: Micro Focus Kanaka for Mac.

The division had been running on NetWare® since before Bowman’s arrival in 1998, and had recently migrated to Open Enterprise Server. With 15 schools spread across 680 square miles of Canadian farmland, the division needed a reliable solution to connect more than 500 Mac workstations to the school network.

Challenge

“The Mac Power servers were not using enterprise-grade hardware. We’d lose a Mac hard drive, and we’d lose backups. The old Mac servers just weren’t cutting it anymore,” Bowman recalls. “We needed enterprise-level networking for our Mac users, and Apple couldn’t provide it.”

In short, the Mac servers were not able to be virtualized, not fault tolerant, not mission-critical ready, and not able to be upgraded easily.

Solution

Bowman installed Micro Focus Kanaka for Mac and easily connected the Mac workstations to Open Enterprise Server and the school’s existing infrastructure.

“We have a single back-end storage architecture that’s seamless between PC and Mac. And it respects the permission structure already built by our IT team,” he says. More than six years later, Lord Selkirk School Division is still using both Novell (now a part of Micro Focus) products. “Micro Focus Kanaka for Mac allowed us to get off of the consumer-grade hardware and use something with fault tolerance and redundancy,” he says. “We didn’t want to risk data loss for our clients. With the Kanaka solution, it wasn’t a question of ‘Do you have that on a backup?’ it was, ‘How far back do you want to go?’”

The school network depends on Open Enterprise Server for its performance, security and reliability.

Our OES system is very rugged,” Bowman explains. “We continue to reap the benefits of inherent OES stability.”

Results

In addition to reliability and fault tolerance, Micro Focus Kanaka for Mac provides a seamless computing experience to the students.

“Users have no idea they’re logging into a PC server from a Mac,” Bowman says. “We started using Micro Focus Kanaka to give students an easy desktop experience, so even the youngest kids could log in quickly without too much fuss.”

The Mac workstations use the same network and the same storage locations as the PCs. “It’s totally transparent to the students. Kids could be on a Mac in the morning and a PC in the afternoon and work on the same project.”

Today, the OES network servers are virtualized, ensuring uptime for Lord Selkirk School Division computers. And Bowman plans to continue using our technology wherever possible. “A variety of options keep us coming back to Novell,” he says. “Being able to interoperate with another manufacturer’s products is invaluable. We are continually finding new products to snap in and make better use of our infrastructure” When other sys admins in the province ask him for advice, it’s a given that Bowman will recommend us.

“There’s a lot of pressure to go with Windows, with what’s simple, what people are using at home. But when you get to this size of network, you can’t look at what’s simple, you have to look at what’s the best, robust system down the road. For server-based stuff, go with Novell. It’s just the smart decision.”

Looking down the road, Bowman sees tablets in the near future for Lord Selkirk School Division.

“Filr and other Novell solutions will allow us to bridge tablets into the network,” he says. “The good news is, you can still connect with Filr and Open Enterprise Server. As a sys admin, I’m telling everyone I can about Filr. It’s really exciting technology.”