Faronics Deep Freeze and Paulsboro School District

Situation

Paulsboro, New Jersey is an industrial town located on the Delaware River across from Philadelphia.Paulsboro Public Schools has two elementary schools, a high school, a repair shop, and an administration building. They are a flat Windows 2000 network with about 20 servers.Each elementary school has four servers, with the remainder of the servers located at the high school. Altogether there are approximately 650 computers in the district, which serve 1,450students andabout 250 employees.Paulsboro has only one technician, and thenetwork administrator can only work on technical issues about 10% of the time.

Problem

The major issue facing Paulsboro School District was the lack of manpower to keep these computers and servers running. They were constantly having to fix computers that had been made unusable through innocent and/or intentional reprogramming. The technician simply didn’t have the time to fix these computers, and so had to resort to “re-imaging” them, which was equally time consuming. This solution didn’t apply in all situations, as imaging was not the answer for computers that were unique in their software configuration. The solution also meant that until the computer was re-imaged, it remained unusable, creating large amounts of downtime and a decrease in resources available for student learning.

Solution

Ted Eiferman, the district’s Computer Network Administrator, saw an ad for Deep Freeze and downloaded an evaluation copy. He tried it on the computers in the high school library, and then expanded that trial to several classrooms. The year that the district had its number of technicians reduced from two to one, Mr. Eiferman made the decision to have all of the student and teacher computers “Frozen.”The vast majority of the teachers in the district didn’t object to the software being implemented, because of the benefit of Deep Freeze’s time-saving capabilities. The unrestrictive nature of Deep Freeze also offered teachers a hassle-free way to give students free reign of the computers, as well as a way to retain a parallel computing environment that was fresh for the next class. And Deep Freeze’s reboot-and-restore capability meant no more downtime.

Evaluation

“Deep Freeze has saved us,” says Mr. Eiferman. The technician rarely gets calls anymore to fix computers because of changes in the software. If they do, the caller is told to reboot the machine to fix the problem. Mr. Eiferman says the computers also run more smoothly because they are not burdened with software designed to stop the user from doing things. Deep Freeze has also been a great help for the district in their computer labs where there is no lab manager and the computers must maintain a consistent configuration. And finally, they don’t have to worry as much about virus infections, because a reboot will stop any infection in its tracks.