Network Refresh - Derby High School

Founded in 1892, Derby High School is a Christian Foundation School. The school is committed to upholding Christian values, and also welcomes pupils of other faiths and traditions.

Migration Summary

Migration from Novell
Derby's Head of ICT, Simon Dyer, inherited an old Novell network, running Novell Netware 3.2 on the server, with 6 year old hardware!

The Senior School had a 70 workstation network and, in a separate building on the same campus, a junior network served a further 14 clients. In addition, there were various standalone PCs throughout the school.

Although the two networks at Derby did have physical links, they were managed by different servers.

Simon's arrival at the school in September 2003 brought with it a focus on the network, which, over the years had been overlooked, as funding and resources had been focussed on other areas of school life.

Reasons for Upgrade Between them, Simon Dyer and Keith Gotheridge (Derby's Network Manager), decided to make the network upgrade a priority for four main reasons: Industry Standardisation: Novell Netware was running Microsoft Works, and their version of Netware was unable to handle Office. Simon and Keith knew that Office was essential to give the students a taste of what was the standard in the commercial world.

Education: Keith wanted to use educationally relevant software that he felt was key for the students. Migrating to an open Microsoft network, especially with the added speed of the new hardware, would enable them to introduce GCSE IT, something they could not have done easily with the existing set up.

Power: Because the network had been neglected for so long, the workstations were the originals and had not been tweaked or upgraded over time. Most of them had Pentium 1 processors, running at no more than 233 MHz.

Consolidation: Finally, they wanted to combine the two networks for ease of administration and shared resources.