Schools seek IT solutions for digital content

Teachers also want the ability to share digital content with colleagues. Credit: Wave Break Media The increasing use of digital content in the classroom is leading many school district IT managers to seek solutions that allow greater computing freedom without the bulk and cost that is sometimes associated with such investments. This search is more often ending with a purchase of a Dell PowerEdge VRTX, which integrates storage, servers and networking in a compact chassis small enough to fit under a desk. But while VRTX might be relatively small, its physical size shouldn’t at all suggest a lack of power. It includes a four-node cluster that can be deployed in under an hour, a unified system-management console to ease administration and the Intel Xenon E5-2600v2 processor, which offers enough efficiency and flexibility to enable high-performance computing. As more school systems move toward virtualization, Xenon-based servers contribute to the ability to consolidate virtualized networking applications. This allows IT to deliver increased throughput performance and latency for virtualized workloads. Capacity building Horry County Schools in South Carolina, a Dell server customer for 20 years, was preparing to conduct a server refresh cycle in about 35 of its 50 schools when district officials decided to invest in virtualization, which had been on their radar for some time. VRTX was attractive because “for not a huge investment we could get capacity of up to four servers and use VMware to build virtual servers on top of the physical,” which was a good way to deploy multiple servers out to the schools, said Thom Mountain, the district’s administrator of network and connectivity. “Any time you get into a blade system, there’s typically a larger upfront cost because you’re purchasing the system as well as the individual modules,” he said. “In this case, it was a real cost-effective solution.” Each school had three physical servers that ran virtual machines. Deploying VRTX, which has up to four blades, allowed Mountain to do some serious consolidation, saving on power consumption, cooling and space. New kinds of bookshelves The storage capacity in VRTX gives schools greater capacity to store more information locally, which is becoming more important as demand for digital content in the classroom grows. Horry County teachers rely on VRTX to share content with other teachers, while security personnel use other VRTX servers to store video surveillance files. Like Horry County Schools, the Mohawk Regional Information Center of Madison-Oneida Board of Cooperative Educational Services in New York was looking to virtualize its servers as its schools were running out of room for physical servers. “With one VRTX enclosure, a district can host dozens of virtual machines in a very small footprint,” said Joe DiFabio, a telecommunications specialist at Mohawk Regional. “Dell PowerEdge VRTX gives our school districts the ability to fail over between compute nodes in the same enclosure, which can really make a difference by ensuring uptime for key applications, including email, file services, student management systems, transportation systems and cafeteria systems.”