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."

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.