When Saddleback Valley Unified School District decided to become one of California's first school districts to go digital, they called Hewlett-Packard.

"The schools were all wired, but not to the classroom", says Neil Strecker, Director of Information Services for Saddleback. The superintendent's vision called for a network with six drops in every classroom in each of the district's 35 schools. After researching network solutions, Saddleback determined that HP ProCurve switches and hubs reduce network cost and complexity through leadership in price, performance, reliability and network management. "I think we're really reaping the rewards now of all that good research, and, of course, the price was right," notes Strecker.

"Price and performance, especially with the lifetime warranty and free upgrades, were the main factors for choosing HP products", says Paul Nguyen, Saddleback's network systems manager. And HP ProCurve's lifetime warranty adds value for the school district, where limited funds mean purchases must last for years. "I looked at some other vendors, who had anywhere from 90-day to three-year warranties," adds Nguyen.

With HP Toptools built-in, HP ProCurve switches enable Nguyen to easily manage the network of 5000 workstations. "One thing I like about the HP ProCurve products is the feature built into the switch where it can find, fix and inform about problems," says Nguyen.Using a telnet session or web browser and HP Proactive Networking features, Nguyen can access any switch from any workstation. Strecker adds, "That's very important because there's only one of Paul and he has 35 schools to support". Saddleback uses a mixture of HP ProCurve 10Base-T, 100Base-T and Gigabit switches throughout the network.

And, by turning to HP for support, Nguyen builds on HP ProCurve's control, uptime and performance. "With the free phone support and Express Exchange service, I can call HP with any technical problem - how to set up certain parts of a network or address certain technical problems," says Nguyen. HP offers worldwide service and support, including multi-vendor network services.

Because HP ProCurve switches are convergence-ready, Saddleback easily manages video, voice and high-speed data transfers, with an HP ProCurve switch at every school. The school district uses videoconferencing both in the classroom and for job interviews and relies on the network to manage voice calls between the district office and schools.

With videoconferencing, voice transactions and high-speed data transfers, Saddleback remains ready for the future. In the future, Saddleback plans to use HP ProCurve's flexible migration capabilities to "migrate some of the smaller schools to a gigabit backbone and some of the bigger schools to an ATM network", says Nguyen. The district also plans to expand video technology throughout the district.