YES Prep Public Schools
Date
:
9/1/2010
We have hot failover running in Hyper-V. We can flip-flop between the physical and the virtual when needed.
— Troy Neal, network manager, YES Prep Public Schools, United States
Challenge
Charter school district YES Prep Public Schools faced growing pains when it tried to replicate successful strategies between campuses. Teachers needed communication tools, as well as a system for managing and sharing student data.Solution
The district implemented Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers supported by a Dell EqualLogic™ Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN), to run collaboration and performance management software in an environment that includes both physical and virtual servers. It also rolled out Dell OptiPlex™ desktop computers and Dell Latitude™ netbooks to improve the reliability of student computers and enhance their computing experience.Benefits
- $500,000 hardware cost avoidance by virtualizing servers
- $70,000 annual savings on service for lab computers
- $100,000 annual hardware savings from iSCSI SANs
- $25,000 savings by using internal network interface controllers (NICs), instead of host bus adapters (HBAs)
- 1 year of IT staff time reclaimed by virtualizing servers
- Avoidance of salary for dedicated SAN expert
- Technical staff dedicated to value-added activities, not cluster maintenance
- No district-level overhead for curriculum development
- One minute to bring virtual test servers online against more than one week for physical servers
- Improved opportunity for teachers to test new applications and services
- Better teacher collaboration
- Twofold increase in student access to computers
- 30 percent cost savings on point-of-sale (POS) PCs
- No problems with POS PCs in one year
