Case Study: Todd County School District achieves 50% improved bandwidth utilization and reliable online services with Barracuda Networks' Link Balancer

Large South Dakota School District Maintains Critical Online Services with Barracuda Link Balancer

Todd County School District, a South Dakota district serving 2,124 students across 11 schools and six office locations, was struggling with critical online services—email, web portals, video conferencing and web-based curriculum—over a single saturated 10 Mbps T1 link. Long waits and timeouts during student testing and everyday administrative tasks persisted despite attempts to cut multimedia content and other remedies.

The district deployed a Barracuda Link Balancer 430 to aggregate and balance two T1 connections, enforce QoS, enable NAT/port forwarding and provide automated failover; the appliance also helped pinpoint a faulty wireless access point. The result was a 50% improvement in bandwidth utilization, reliable access for streaming, testing and online coursework, markedly fewer help-desk calls and measurable time‑savings and productivity gains.

Todd County School District

Yancy Gunhammer

Technology Assistant Coordinator