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."