Student Information Systems

PowerSchool Partners with Rackspace for Hosted SIS

• By Leila Meyer
• 11/02/15

PowerSchool has selected Rackspace as the new cloud-service provider for its PowerSchool student information system (SIS) hosted service.

The company spent two months evaluating cloud service providers before selecting Rackspace, a company that has significant experience in planning, deploying and managing server, storage and network configurations. Factors that may have influenced PowerSchool's decision included Rackspace's 100 percent network uptime guarantee (excluding maintenance), enterprise-grade data centers located around the world, and other components of the company's competitive service-level agreements.

According to a news release from PowerSchool, the partnership with Rackspace enables the company to offer its hosted SIS with "ultra-high bandwidth, robust failover capabilities, data encryption, storage performance and systems monitoring that meets the needs of large and small school districts in the United States and internationally."

Key features of the new PowerSchool SIS hosted service include:

• Redundant, bonded 10 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) network connection;
• Enhanced server availability by migrating virtual application service to another physical host if the current host becomes unresponsive or unavailable;
• XTS-AES 256-bit data-at-rest encryption of all PowerSchool data;
• Fault-tolerant EMC VMAX enterprise data storage array; and
• Systems monitoring capable of processing thousands of metrics per second and real-time alerts.

"This is a critical relationship for PowerSchool as we seek to deliver the highest quality K-12 technology cloud solutions to our customers, including the assurance that their student data is highly available and secure," said Hardeep Gulati, CEO of PowerSchool, in a prepared statement.

Further information about PowerSchool's partnership with Rackspace and the new hosted SIS service can be found on PowerSchool's site.