Suffolk County District Moves to Virtualized Infrastructure
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Center Moriches School District in New York has revamped its infrastructure and adopted a new technology delivery model, opting to virtualize its servers and deploy a Citrix Application Delivery solution. The overhaul was handled by technology services provider DynTek.
According to DynTek, the district wanted to optimize its infrastructure and provide greater access to technology for students, teachers, and administrators. "After a thorough analysis of CMSD's infrastructure, requirements and budgetary considerations, the DynTek team recommended CMSD move to a virtual infrastructure environment to provide a stable platform for CMSD's critical applications and deploy a Citrix application delivery model to provide access to those applications," according to DynTek.
The deployment included VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3.5, EqualLogic PS Series SAN for backup and recovery, HP servers and tape storage for business continuity, and the installation of a 1 GB wireless network. Virtualization cut the number of servers used in the district in half (down to four).
"Our new virtual infrastructure has proven to be a tremendous benefit to the District," said the Center Moriches School District Superintendent Donald James in a statement released this week. "We now have a reliable, highly stable and extensible infrastructure that is capable of supporting the applications we need to provide services to our faculty and students."
The district is also deploying laptops as thin clients for teachers. That is, the laptops themselves do not contain any applications; they're housed remotely. Students also have access to the thin clients while on school grounds and can log in to access district resources from remote locations.
A case study covering the move to a virtual infrastructure and application delivery model can be downloaded in PDF format here.
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About the author: David Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's online education technology publications, including THE Journal and Campus Technology. He can be reached at [email protected].
Proposals for articles and tips for news stories, as well as questions and comments about this publication, should be submitted to David Nagel, executive editor, at [email protected].