Data Centers

Blue Springs School District Consolidates Data Center

• By Leila Meyer
• 02/23/16

Blue Springs School District in Kansas City, MO has consolidated its data and information technology services within a centralized data center in an effort to simplify management and reduce expenses.

The district serves 14,700 students at 22 elementary, middle and high schools. Before consolidating the data center, IT staff managed 144 servers at more than 23 locations. In 2015, students in grades 3-11 were required to take their standardized tests online, and districts were required to implement a test site management server for every 150 computers to ensure that the servers could handle the load during online tests. Since Blue Springs operates more than 10,000 computers, they would have had to set up 30 to 40 test site management servers.

That was when district administrators decided to consolidate the data center. As part of the process, the district upgraded its Avaya network backbone and implemented a centralized smart storage solution from Nutanix. "We could bring all the data and services back to one centralized location," said Tim Jones, director of IT for Blue Springs School District, in a news release. "Now we're managing one, not 21, data centers. Our Avaya backbone was one of the reasons to go to a centralized datacenter model. I knew we had a backbone that could handle it."

Since implementing the centralized networking infrastructure, the district has realized numerous benefits, according to a news release from Avaya. Blue Springs has reduced the amount of time and number of people required to manage the servers and reduced its electricity costs by $100,000 on an annualized basis. It can also manage the entire district's standardized tests with a single test site management server running on the Avaya backbone.