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School Wires

Schoolwires Empowers America’s Students with the Help of Expedient Colocation and Connectivity Services.

Schoolwires, Inc. offers one of the most powerful website management solutions for schools K through 12. It has developed a hosting program that enables schools to offer a robust online presence that allows better interaction between students, teachers, the school and parents as well as the surrounding community. Schoolwires web hosting service is centrally-managed, cost effective, and secure. The company has 41 employees and is headquartered in State College, Pennsylvania.

Richard Stivers, Manager of Network and IT Services at Schoolwires, has been with the company since 2001 and has brought to its team nearly a decade of experience in network architecture development, implementation, and training. He was an integral member of the project team that designed, developed, and documented the Schoolwires Academic Portal core product. He wrote part of the original software solution which was based on what the state of Pennsylvania was already using.

"We partnered with the company that originally wrote the PAPowerPort and rewrote it for the K through 12 market," said Stivers. "From that point, I was the person they trained to manage that original hosting environment. Schoolwires had a growth plan in place that was aggressive. The service level our clients expected could only have been met with a third party hosting company."

Stivers said they did an in-depth search and found that Expedient gave them a local presence that could meet their needs. "We know we would have someone monitoring our environment 24x7X365. We also needed input on hosting technology, and have leveraged Expedients expertise on architecture to ensure we have the right equipment and the correct network setup to allow our product to work most effectively."

Stivers said Expedient gave them the tools to continue moving forward. "We could not have offered our services at the price point we wanted if we had to host it ourselves. We needed to have both high availability and room to grow."

"Recently, we released a new product called Synergy which is requiring about a 2 terabyte network storage solution based off of the shared storage that Expedient offers. Working with them is going to allow us to package up that solution very effectively and gives us room to scale up to 5 terabytes. It will give each student a 100MB or 250MB of space where they can save files online, so it’s a service that requires quite a bit of bandwidth and support."

It is flexibility and the ability to easily scale up that has prompted Stivers and the Schoolwires team to expand its services with Expedient. "We started with two or three servers. Today we have about two and a half racks of equipment running Windows 2003 on Dell 2950 servers, Our product is based on Microsoft’s ASP and ASP.NET on the web front with a SQL Server back end. In total, we have about 31 web servers and six SQL servers," said Stivers.

"We have a totally managed and hosted solution right now. Expedient manages all of our machines and does all of the patching for us which saves me quite a bit of time. 31 servers is too much for one person, and with their help I know our servers are being monitored 24/7/365."

"The great thing is, as we continue to grow and offer new products on .NET, we leveraged Expedient and architected a high availability system with load balancing and clustering via hosted services that would have been impossible to do on our own and we can pass savings to our clients. We could not afford to offer this without some of the managed services from Expedient."

About Schoolwires

Schoolwires strives to deliver the finest and most complete suite of online products and related services designed to meet the needs of our nation’s K through 12 schools, and the students, parents and teachers that they serve. These solutions are designed to empower schools to improve communication, collaboration and achievement. For more information visit the company’s website at www.schoolwires.com.

About Expedient

Expedient manages one of America’s largest all-Ethernet networks, delivering advanced internet, voice and managed services to commercial and government entities throughout the United States. Through the power of its carrier-class Ethernet IP network and class one data centers, Expedient provides innovative and cost-effective networking solutions engineered to meet even the most demanding business needs. Expedient is a proud member of the Continental Broadband family of commercial internet data service providers wholly owned by Landmark Communications. Privately owned Landmark Communications’ companies are a diverse group of award-winning publications and media outlets, including newspapers, television broadcasting, cable TV programming (The Weather Channel), and electronic publishing. To learn more about Expedient and Ethernet Anywhere, please log on to expedient.com, ethernetanywhere.com or call 866-276-2973, toll-free.