Environment & Technology

Overview

Andover IT supports an extensive community of users and equipment:

• 1300+ full and part time employees
• 6200+ students
• 23 campus buildings
• 15+ miles of fiber optic network connecting all buildings; 10,000+ internal wired connections
• 150+ network switches and appliances
• Two server and storage farms with 50TB+ capacity
• 1000+ staff computers; 3000+ student devices; 3000+ BYOD student devices.  Including personal devices our network handles traffic for 15-20,000 devices simultaneously.
• 1500+ Tablets
• 500+ each of: wireless access points, interactive projectors, handsets, UC speakers and intercoms
• Support for an extensive network of security, surveillance, environmental/HVAC, access, audio visual and other systems
• IT Customer Service responds to 5000+ user help requests per year

The Town maintains two identical master data centers as well as a tertiary data center housed at a remote third party site.  The two primary and secondary data centers provide distributed, load balanced operations during normal operation but allow for completely independent functioning in the event of data center or network failure.  The tertiary data center is a “hardend” facility that houses our main internet connections and provides limited backup and redundancy.  Schools and most town buildings are connected via high speed fiber and have almost no local computing or storage capability.  By centralizing our operations we have greatly reduced both acquisition and maintenance costs while simultaneously providing reliable redundancy and failover.

We currently provide 2gbps of Internet connectivity to all town and school functions.  Large schools and buildings are connected at 10 or 20gbps and our data centers communicate across a 40gbps connection.  All buildings are fully wirelessly enabled.

Key Technologies