Orange County, Florida Public School Selects Tricord As Hardware Platform For Classroom Computing, Campus Networking

Business Wire, Oct 9, 1996

PLYMOUTH, Minn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 9, 1996--

Supporting More Users with Less Servers Allows District to Focus on Educational Goals

The 16th largest school system in the U.S., Orange County, Florida's public school district is a leader in the use of computers in the classroom -- from providing campus networks to creating a wide area network (WAN) that will eventually link all of the district's 130 educational facilities.

To build the network backbone, the district has chosen Tricord PowerFrame Enterprise servers. With the recent $250,000 purchase of four PowerFrame Enterprise servers, the Orange County Public Schools now boasts a total of nine Tricord servers, each supporting anywhere from 100-500 end-users.

"Individual schools and adult ed facilities are given great discretion in how they use their systems, including which operating systems and applications they choose to run," says Jerry Weyland, the district's senior administrator of technical services. "This allows more of our students and staff to get good exposure to real-world networking." Both Novell(R) NetWare(R) and Windows NT(TM) Server are run on different PowerFrame systems, demonstrating the flexibility the Intel-based Tricord platform provides in a networked environment by supporting multiple operating systems.

With each server supporting up to 500 end-users, the PowerFrame's scalable, open system architecture allows the district to serve it's faculty and students with a minimum investment in the hardware and personnel necessary to support and grow these network systems.

As in corporate or governmental mission-critical network computing environments, Orange County schools are deploying a variety of applications, including group-wide email, and various administrative, office, and graphics programs. All schools in the district will eventually be linked via a 56 Kbps WAN network, allowing students and faculty to share information via a district-wide Media Center, which includes curriculum-based information, multimedia applications, and Internet access.

"It's crucial for students today to have hands-on knowledge of computers and a solid roadmap for the information age," says Weyland. "We don't want our kids and faculty to lose a moment of learning time -- we can depend on the performance and availability of our PowerFrame servers to keep our networks up and running."

Tricord Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: TRCD) designs, manufactures, markets and supports the PowerFrame Enterprise Server for use in mission-critical applications running on Microsoft Windows NT(TM) , Novell(R) Netware(R), and UNIX(R). All PowerFrame systems are characterized by an open system design emphasizing system management, high availability, high performance and scalability. Tricord is a worldwide corporation based in Plymouth, Minn. USA, with European headquarters in Woerden, Holland. For more information please call or visit the company's Web site at http://www.tricord.com. 1-800/Tricord (US and Canada) or 31/34-843-3772 (International).

CONTACT: Liz Hersey

Tricord Systems, Inc.

612/551-6609

lhersey@tricord.com