Extreme Connect 2025
May 19-22
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Amidst the rolling hills and verdant fields of California’s Santa Maria Valley, you’ll find a collection of quaint farming and vital industrial communities. There, public education is evolving alongside technology.
Students from three main communities in the valley depend on Santa Maria Joint Union High School District (hereafter “Santa Maria”) for a connected education that will prepare them for bright futures. With around 9,000 students and 1,000 staff to support, the network operations team at Santa Maria—a group of about 21 staff—were pulling double and triple duty to handle the request load and address connectivity issues.
“We have to make do with what we have,” said Mark Recinos, Manager of Information Technology at Santa Maria. “We don’t always have enough funds to fund all the projects we want to do. And finding support for an enterprise level network serving 10,000 people is a luxury we didn’t have previously.”
Along with team members like Michael Ellsworth, a network administrator for Santa Maria, Recinos often found his team “banging their heads on a wall.”
“Finding the resolution to issues, we had to maintain a balance of all these components and just keep plugging along,” Recinos recalls. Challenging areas for the team included the volume of emails his team received about issues, not having an efficient way to rank and track requests, and the process of “planning for the unplanned.”
“We’re a high school district,” said Ellsworth, “So we don’t have to deal with kindergarteners trying to type in a password, but our students and staff are constantly utilizing internet services to a higher degree than lower grade levels.” This amounted to major draws on bandwidth, always in the one-hour increment of class periods.
“When we’d have network issues, it was seeding distrust of the network infrastructure where students and staff were avoiding technology in the curriculum,” Ellsworth said. “So, our focus was on optimizing our infrastructure, minimizing downtime, and doing so within our tight budget.”
“We were hearing from staff, district administration staff, and we knew how important our network was—especially in times like important state testing where students can’t be having dropped connections,” said Recinos.
“So, I knew we needed to engage Extreme to take a look and help with that.”
Reliability and security were major focus points in Santa Maria’s initial discussions with Extreme. And as it turns out, the need for secure, reliable connection extended even beyond the classroom.
“We have a lot of outdoor spaces that we need to cover,” Recinos said of the vocational and athletic spaces that factored into the challenge. “We looked for a solution that provisioned for all of those, and that made the budget challenges even more important to work within.”
As Recinos and his team got to know Extreme solutions, they also developed relationships with teammates like Shahriar Ahmad, an Extreme senior account executive local to the area—and part of a team that Santa Maria already knew well.
“We’d had a relationship with Extreme for close to 20 years, from some prior projects, when we started this project. When we started getting a lot of frustration with the wireless network, especially at testing times, we knew we had to make a change and upgrade,” Recinos recalled. “We realized ‘You know, Extreme offers a wireless network’ and that they could support two major network environments under one manufacturer’s offerings.”
“We started working with Shahriar to plan what that could look like, and we’ve never looked back,” he said.
Working through the E-Rate process, C1 was chosen as a solutions provider and by leveraging district funds and E-Rate, Extreme and C1 were able to build a recommendation that would address both switching and wireless needs while optimizing that budget.
“We were constantly battling move and change requests and doing manual change port tagging to the appropriate VLAN,” said Ellsworth of the unpleasant “before” at Santa Maria. “Just because it’s plugged in, doesn’t mean it’s on the right network.” With Extreme Fabric and the shift to shortest path bridging and policy-based networking, Ellsworth said.
Where previous solutions to universal port management had never worked well for Santa Maria’s network team, Fabric was able to alleviate the workload of port-based VLANs, automating uplinks and switch deployments.
“We are still in the process of upgrading our infrastructure to gain the full benefits of it, but already the change is so exciting as we begin to adapt our network and deploy policy-based networking with Fabric,” Ellsworth said. “It just puts users on the appropriate VLAN automagically.”
(And yes, we’re absolutely going to use that phrase in the future!)
Moving from one manufacturer to Extreme on half of the environment at Santa Maria turned out to be an “apples to apples” switch for the team.
“Everything configured over except perhaps our oldest switches—one in particular we were sure was possibly 20 years old—but we were really able to configure everything over quite easily.” Ellsworth said C1 and Extreme were able to work together to complete most all of the converting wireless, along with providing the service and support needed to deploy the network.
“Working with C1 and then with Extreme’s products, this deployment happened within maybe a month, month and a half period of time,” said Recinos. “It was just super-fast, students were out for summer when we started in mid-July, and we were operational before they returned for the new school year.”
When Santa Maria’s team looks back on their greatest changes and biggest results since the implementation, they say student and staff sentiment have shifted dramatically.
“Our students and staff are trusting the network,” said Ellsworth of the shift. “That’s something that the last 4 or 5 years, have been a hard-earned change.” Recinos adds that the peace of mind and reliability gained working with Extreme has been a game-changer for the school system’s ability to put on events.
“We’ve offered a few large-scale events where reliability needed to be on the spot. We didn’t have any outages, and we didn’t experience any people not being able to connect,” he said. “These were large, marquee events in our community and everything worked exactly as it should.”
Looking back on the scale of the previous problems and the implementation, Recinos and Ellsworth say, it feels like they had a true partner in Extreme and C1.
“Working with Extreme and C1, for me, has been a blessing for our district,” said Recinos of the process. “The support, the attention, the time, the dedication that both teams have provided has led us to where we are today—with a very reliable network that is so different than it was before.”
Visit https://extremenetworks.com to learn more about how Extreme can power your network and drive your most critical E-Rate upgrade projects.
