Virtual Iron has become the server virtualization solution of choice for K-12 school systems. This blog describes how the Emanuel County School System, a rural school district in Georgia, is using Virtual Iron. The next entry profiles the Pawtucket School Department, an urban school district across the US.

Emanuel County is located 90 miles west of Savannah, Georgia. It covers almost 700 square miles in east-central Georgia and is home to just over 22,000 residents. While the area is largely rural, the county school district puts a high priority on developing strong educational programs and it views information technology as an important enabler for achieving this goal. The school system educates 4,500 students in eight schools covering pre-K through 12th grade.

As the school system has grown, it has put increasing pressure on its IT systems. The district moved into a new centralized data center, bought new, more powerful servers and, for a short time, resolved its problems. But, as the county, its school system, and its IT needs continued to grow, the school system quickly outgrew the capacity of its new data center. Where it started with 20 servers, Emanuel County quickly added more to meet increasing demand. This created significant power and space issues. There was pressure to add additional servers as well, but retrofitting the data center to accommodate that growth was a very expensive proposition. This led to a decentralized architecture with seven different locations each housing three to four servers supporting the school district. The root cause of this server sprawl was the low utilization of the school system’s existing server infrastructure. Each server was dedicated to a single application running, in most cases, at less than 15% utilization. This was a clear indication that implementing server virtualization would pay significant dividends in terms of both OpEx and CapEx savings.

ECSS looked at several vendors, including VMware, but deemed it too expensive and too complex. They also tested both Citrix XenSource and Novell Xen, but did not feel the capabilities in these solutions were comprehensive enough to meet its needs. These solutions also required Linux command line programming which introduced unnecessary complexity for the ECSS IT staff. They then learned about Virtual Iron, and after extensive internal testing, found it much easier to use and afford.

Today, with the help of server and storage virtualization from Virtual Iron and LeftHand Networks, ECSS has streamlined its data center, reducing its number of servers from 38 to 18, with half of those servers part of a hot backup site for disaster recovery. With this consolidation, the school system has not only reduced its power and cooling costs, but also avoided the physical labor, capital expenses and server outages that would have resulted from retrofitting its existing data center with additional cooling and power outlets.

The school district is running Windows and Linux workloads side by side on the same servers. Typical Windows workloads being virtualized include the district’s e-mail archive system, Zenworks Configuration Management, and eDirectory services. Typical Linux workloads include Novell OES2, SASI Student Information System and Novell GroupWise. Emanuel County and SSI report no performance degradation on those workloads.

The Pawtucket School Department in Rhode Island is leveraging server virtualization as a core foundation to streamline its IT infrastructure and reduce its capital and operating expenses.

The school department serves over 9000 students and 1300 faculty and staff, throughout 17 schools and an administration building. With reduced city and state aid to education, there is never enough money to support the technology and the related services required by its constituents.

Mike St. Jean, the school department's Director of Technology, has used creativity and resourcefulness to deliver a high level of IT services across the entire school district. Over the past few years, under Mike’s leadership, the school department shifted its district-wide technology model and resources from a traditional client-server model to thin client and server based computing model.

As a result, the Pawtucket School Department has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars while greatly increasing access, services, security, and manageability compared to traditional desktop computers. However, this new architecture introduced its own new set of challenges. One negative byproduct has been the sheer amount of server sprawl that has resulted. For example, each high school has one Novell Netware workgroup server and six Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 (Win2K3) terminal servers. Each junior high school has one Netware and four Win2K3 Terminal Servers. Each elementary school has one Netware and one to two Win2k3R2 terminal servers. The Administration Building houses an additional twenty or so terminal, workgroup, web, communications, data, and application servers. District-wide the IT staff maintains eighty servers, supporting 2000 workstations, 1600 of which are dedicated thin clients, with a need for further expansion. Clearly, the environment was ripe for server virtualization and consolidation.

In early 2007, St. Jean set out to research server virtualization technologies. He looked at every available option in detail, testing them himself to form his own opinions. Eventually, Mike got around to testing Virtual Iron. He downloaded the Virtual Iron free trial. Within ten minutes he had the Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager installed and was off and running. This trial was so encouraging and the management capabilities so intuitive and robust that, after reviewing all the available alternatives, St. Jean and his IT staff decided Virtual Iron was the best product, period. Even though it cost more than the free products, it had additional performance and management capabilities that the School District simply could not live without. But this cost was still significantly less than comparable offerings by VMware or Citrix.

According to St. Jean, “ based on the success of these trials, the IT staff plans to cut the district’s 36 physical school-based terminal servers in half due to Virtual Iron’s ability to provide additional management, provisioning, backup, and archiving capabilities. Another benefit is that the IT staff will be able to reduce the electrical and cooling requirements of each school’s central wiring and server closets. This is a significant factor in very old, cramped school buildings, with older infrastructure.”

With a small initial investment, the dedicated IT staff at Pawtucket School District has been able to build gradually, absorbing technologies and expanding capacity as budgets allow. One of the things that the team liked best about Virtual Iron is that it provided it with the ability to start small and to scale fast. Going forward, there are also another dozen or so services targeted for virtualization over the next year as the administration center adds additional managed nodes.

Just as the Pawtucket School Department’s IT staff shifted from a traditional client-server model to thin client infrastructure to realize substantial cost savings and management efficiencies, it is looking to leverage Virtual Iron as a core foundation solution to take CapEx and OpEx savings and management efficiencies to the next level. In St. Jean's words, "Virtual Iron is budget friendly to cash-starved school districts, easy to setup, use and maintain for time-limited IT staff, and is stable, high performing, and secure to meet the exponentially growing technology needs of students, faculty, and administration."

SearchServerVirtualization posted a Podcast on their site highlighting how seven of Virtual Iron's rapidly growing family of customers are deploying Virtual Iron to reduce their capital and operating expenses and improve their ability to better align their IT operations with their business goals.

The customers featured in this podcast are a diverse group, representing a broad set of industries and business models, including professional services, health care delivery, retail, software as a service (SaaS), ecommerce, media and publishing and IT services. They can be found across the US, Canada and Europe. Some are well known, some are not. They range from one person, Windows–only IT shops running iSCSI SAN arrays and a limited number of workloads in test and staging environments to large, sophisticated IT departments running a variety of Windows Server and Linux OS guests and a broad range of demanding workloads in production environments with mixed Fiber Channel and iSCSI SAN arrays.

Despite the wide variances outlined above, these organizations all have something very fundamental in common – a strong desire to take full advantage of the well-documented operational and economic benefits of server virtualization in a way that is both affordable and easy to manage. The Podcast is available here. Please note that it sits on a third-party site and does require registration. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Hobsons EMT, which provides customizable, Web-based software solutions for higher education, is using server virtualization to enhance its data center efficiency and increase service levels while reducing power and cooling and cutting costs in the process. Patrick McFadin, director of engineering, spoke recently to InfoWorld about how Hobsons is using server virtualization, why they selected Virtual Iron over VMware and lessons learned about best practices for implementation. Links to the podcast are available here.

A new customer story is available on our web site:

New Jersey Sharing Network is leveraging server virtualization software from Virtual Iron to increase server utilization, quickly and easily provision new systems for users, and to reduce power, cooling and space requirements in its data center. Virtual Iron provides a very effective and easy to use alternative to VMware that improves the organization’s ROI and enables it to expand its server virtualization initiative.

Download the New Jersey Sharing Network case study [PDF].

Curtis Franklin is blogging from the InfoWorld Virtualization Forum that Virtual Iron is sponsoring.

I wasn't able to make it out to the event but a lot of Virtual Iron folks are there and I should have some great info, photos and videos from the event to post later this week.

Earlier today, we issued a press release detailing all of our recent announcements:

- Our new financing
- Our increasing customer base
- Great growth in our channel around the world
- Recent reviews and other industry validation

For the full article, click here. For more information, check our our recent press releases and news postings.

Earlier this week, we announced that we closed an additional $20 million in financing:

“This funding and the increased valuation are a reflection of Virtual Iron’s strong market momentum. The server virtualization market is exploding and Virtual Iron is growing faster than the market itself,” said Ed Walsh, CEO of Virtual Iron. “Virtual Iron is known for providing enterprise server virtualization made easy. Our clients and partners get all the advanced benefits of server virtualization without the cost and complexity. The company’s market momentum is a direct result of the significant value our software delivers for our clients and partners.”

Full article here.

CIO.com has the results of their "Virtualization in the Enterprise" Survey and you can see the results here.

No real surprises here....the survey shows:

- Virtualization is being used for server consolidation by most, followed by disaster recovery.
- Virtualization is mostly being used on servers in the data center, but many are using storage virtualization and desktop virtualization.
- Much of the virtualization implementation is being done in-house.
- A vast majority are happy with the ROI received from implementing virtualization.

Full survey results are here and thanks to Gordon Haff at CNet for pointing this out in his blog.)

From CXOtoday, the five virtues of virtualization:

- Server unification and infrastructure maximization
- Reduction in cost of infrastructure
- Enhances flexible functionality of management
- High accessibility of applications and data
- Improves system compliance

For the full article and CXOtoday's reasoning behind each virtue, click here.