Up9 Consulting

Google Services Integration

Up9 Consulting recently implemented a complete transition of Alhambra Elementary School District’s email services. The in-place solution was suffering from request overload and a corrupted mail spool. With school starting in the near future and state funding endangered by an inability to submit required reports, the timeline presented to them by their existing support provider was unacceptable.

Up9 Consulting diagnosed the matter and offered a handful of solutions, including a transition to Google services. With the approval of the Superintendent, work started immediately and was done within a week of first contact. AESD’s existing support provider was still working on enacting a solution after Up9’s work was completed.

With the transition to Google services, AESD now has a stable email platform as well as the ability to use other Google services such as Google Calendar, Google docs, and Postini, an email archiving service that meets ADE statutes. On a local level, AESD was able to repurpose multiple servers to bolster other services, increasing overall reliability with adding costs.

Data Warehousing

Within many schools districts you will typically find a myriad of systems being used to track tasks as varying as school lunches to student grades to media checkouts. With a rise in the mantra of "decisions being lead by data," quite frequently these varied systems do little to nothing to combine this data into a broad picture of how this data inter-relates or affects student achievement. Schools districts frequently will work towards combining authentication systems, file storage, and other network related services, but rarely is this same focus applied to their data. This results in the most important information being managed by solutions such as a single employee manually pulling all data, or "if you can find it, you can use" it setups.

When working with Paradise Valley Unified School District, Up9 was able to take existing warehousing efforts and optimize them, eliminating a major bottleneck in their reporting. After working with their existing server infrastructure to increase scalability and load handling, Up9 helped redesign the databases into a more efficient and scalable setup. After implementing the changes PVUSD saw immediate returns on the investment with query times being drastically reduced, in factors of 10 at times.

We take into consideration all existing systems before proposing a solution to any school district concerning their data. Then after carefully mapping all existing data points we either deploy scripts for pushing into your existing databases, or help you plan out a database setup to provide scalability and redundancy.

Server Optimization

Up9 Consulting was asked to implement a solution for a client experiencing difficulty with services involving their MySQL database. Users were experiencing extremely slow service, and in some cases were unable to complete their request at all. Up9 immediately implemented a tracking system to monitor the load balance across the network. After gathering data for two weeks, it became apparent that the servers in place were not load balanced. Services that were in use constantly were on the same server as services that received a large amount of traffic over a short period of time, such as during testing. The crush of requests resulted in poor performance, which frustrated the end user, who would refresh their request, further compounding the issue. After a short amount of time, servers were dealing solely with expired requests in an effort to catch up with live users.

Through a combination of virtualization, manually adjusting how each server allocated its internal resources such as CPU and RAM usage, and the migration of steady use services away from services that have usage spikes, Up9 was able to restore a successful user experience without additional hardware. Up9 also implemented a continual tracking system and trained district employees on its use so that monitoring could be handled in-house.

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