Cisco IP Telephones Enable Rapid Recovery
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Tuesday September 11, 2001 was far from business as usual for the Hartford
Public Schools. As news of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington
spread, the immediate need at Central Office was to get instructions to the
schools on how to respond. The urgent message from the Superintendant: keep
the kids in school. As the World Trade Center towers were collapsing, HPS IT staff members Maureen Cmara and Stephen Shipman worked to set up a call center in Conference Room One. With a traditional telephone system this would have been a Herculean task. Hartford Schools' new Cisco IP telephone system met the challenge easily: we placed a Cisco 3524XL switch in the conference room to provide connectivity and power to the phones. As we rounded up extra phones from the executive offices, members of the secretarial staff arrived. As requested, most had brought their own IP phones with them. In about twenty minutes all of the participants had a working telephone in front of them. After receiving a script and instructions from Superintendant Amato and Chief of Staff Robert Henry, they began calling each of the schools in the district with the Superintendant's message. At eleven thirty the call center was wrapping up the last of its calls when the next challenge presented itself. State and Hartford Police arrived; on the strength of a threatening phone call to the State they had evacuated the State Department of Insurance from the building and were now ordering HPS to leave as well. A decision was made to establish an emergency operations center (EOC) at Barnard Brown elementary school and move the Superintendant and his top staff there. Chris Collins, network engineer in the HPS IT department and David Hollingsworth, network engineer from SBC Datacom worked at Barnard Brown to prepare the school's library for use as the EOC. They had Cisco switches ready and patch cables laid out and taped to the floor as other members of the IT staff arrived. As members of the executive staff arrived bearing their IP phones, they plugged in and were making and receiving calls in minutes. The IT department massed a large force at the EOC to provide the support needed to recover basic business operations. Staff members on hand included: Bill Benjamin, Angel Carion, Chris Collins, Maureen Cmara, Steve DeBow, David Hollingsworth (SBC Datacom), Bob Richter (Network and Telecom Manager), Stephen Shipman, and Mike Vasquenza (Director). This move would have been impossible with traditional telephone systems. The requirements for cabling, programming, and access to telephone trunks make traditional PBX systems much less flexible. Because of the clustered design of our IP phone system, users at the Oxford Center were able to pick up and go: by bringing their IP phones with them they also brought along their telephone numbers. The school system's main switchboard made the move to the EOC as well. Had the Oxford Center been damaged or otherwise offline this same migration would have been possible. Phone service would have been degraded -- loss of incoming direct-dialed calls -- and setup time would have been ninety minutes instead of thirty, but the phones would work. The distributed and redundant nature of the HELPnet network and our Cisco IP telephone implementation would provide the resiliency and flexibility needed. Tuesday called for quick work and flexible tools. The HPS IT staff and the IP telephone system provided both to keep the school system's executives in touch and in control. |
 Roberta Slitt Executive Assistant to the Chief of Staff Links: * Superintendant Amato's message to parents |
Hartford Public Schools Information Technology Department | Updated 9-12-01