IT Trends

Arizona School System Enhances Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/05/19

An Arizona school system has enhanced its virtual desktop implementation to simplify IT management and improve performance and security. Sunnyside Unified School District chose HiveIO from a company with the same name.

The district IT organization, serving 16,300 students in 20 schools, sought a way to continue growing its infrastructure while streamlining the IT experience and making operations transparent to users. Sunnyside chose the company's hyperconverged fabric platform to reside on top of its existing hardware to create a virtual desktop ecosystem managed from a single viewpoint.

"Prior to the Hive Fabric deployment, the Sunnyside IT team was using four different vendors on a traditional three-tier architecture, with separate boxes from separate vendors for compute, network and storage," said CIO, Javier Baca, in a statement. "We selected HiveIO because it was an easier-to-manage [virtual desktop infrastructure] solution that provided simple scalability and was just as robust as our current stack. Hive Fabric also helped the district transition from managing individual desktops to pools of desktops, which freed up our IT resources, allowing the team to focus on delivering an even better experience to our staff and students."

The new virtual desktop infrastructure now offers the ability for students to access their profiles no matter what computing device they're using and lets IT roll out Windows operating system and application updates more efficiently behind the scenes, without user awareness.