Kewanee is located in Henry County Illinois and has a population of about 13,000. This city was founded in 1854 and was initially called Berrian. Most schools recognize Labor Day as a reminder that summer is coming to a close and a new school year is about to commence. In Kewanee, Labor Day is even more special - it is known to its people as "hog days" and has grown into a large celebration which includes a parade, flea market, road race, Model T-race, pork barbecue and a midway.
In addition to the festivities of "hog days" - the IT staff of Kewanee School District get prepared to bring in the new school year...
The Kewanee School District has a total enrollment of 2254 students. Mike Perva, IT Director for Kewanee School District, tries to maintain his sense of humor at all times. He has to manage a distributed network of over 700 public access systems (both PC and Mac) with just two computer technicians and with over 2100 rambunctious students trying to make his life as interesting as possible. The school districts network replaces around 60 machines/year.
Kewanee school district faces daily end-point computer issues; which are quite usual of any shared-user computing environment. Workstations were wide open to viruses, spyware, and malicious software changes. Inadvertent workstation changes were a big issues in the schools' public access computer labs, causing Kewanees’s IT service calls to be flooded with “day-to-day” support calls.
In addition, the Kewanee School District has an open computing policy and does not want to restrict their students too much – so, software corruption and disaster recovery are an ever-present problem.
Constantly trying to bring sanity to an uncontrolled computing environment was straining the school district’s already under-staffed IT department. The primary issues were the IT time and resources that were required to restore broken-down computers to their baseline state. Kewanee's IT staff were faced with having to fix these issues while keeping pace with new software deployments in addition to many other support requests that come into the IT department's inbox. With Kewanee's, existing staff, managing their workstations was unsustainable under the current conditions.
The Kewanee's IT department had come to a crossroads whereby they needed to decided on whether they should add additional technical persons onto their staff to deal with the day-to-day PC restoration issues – or find a solution to maintaining their existing workstations from going constantly “out-of-order”.
During a District Regional office meeting, Mike Perva had received some handouts from their regional resource person, one of which was a description of Drive Vaccine. Intrigued, Perva sent off for a trial copy and soon became a convert...
With Drive Vaccine - Mike was able to rethink their workstation preservation strategy and chose to advance with technology as opposed to simply adding more support staff to handle low level technical issues. He first installed Drive Vaccine on a small school lab; and within 3 months he had deployed Drive Vaccine across his entire district's public access workstations.
Today, Drive Vaccine provides the students and teachers of the Kewanee school district with a positive computing experience, free from spyware, malware, viruses, and system downtime.
Teachers can keep teaching... Students can keep learning... and IT personnel can stop fixing.
“Drive Vaccine is fast”, said Perva, “and very reliable. All corruption problems can be resolved with a simple reboot.” In addition, the remote management console means that he does not have to run around between building to resolve problems. He recently upgraded his entire network to Drive Vaccine Plus, for both the PCs and the Macs.
Drive Vaccine fully protects workstations without restricting policy's or user access. Everytime a workstation is restarted, Drive Vaccine restores the computers back to its original baseline state. It has made Kewanee's public access computing labs easier to manage, while keeping their computing assets fully functional. “Drive Vaccine is exactly what the doctor ordered... Our PC's are now immune from user errors, viruses, malware and other cripple ware.”
Mike Perva is so charmed by the Drive Vaccine that he tells everyone about it. Recently he told his Security Camera system rep. “He was very excited”, recounts Perva, “as every time there is a glitch in any new release of the software, he has to rush to dozens of sites to fix things. He now plans to install Drive Vaccine at every site so that, if there is a problem, he can roll them back to a clean state using the remote console.”
As much as Drive Vaccine has reduced his IT burdens, Perva’s life is not entirely free of incident. During this point in our phone interview, Perva was suddenly interrupted by an excited voice in the background, every syllable of which reflected it’s owners stress. Perva listened for a moment and then came back on the phone. “I have to go”, he said with a sigh. “We just installed a new lab of 40 computers last night and did not get around to putting Drive Vaccine on them yet. The fourth graders have just set every machine in the lab into black-and-white and nobody knows how to get it back.“
Reduces computer maintenance by up to 90%
