Atlantis Computing Software-Defined Solution Improved Kennet School PC Performance

Kennet School reduced the amount of money it spends on desktop PCs by 30% and saved £40,000 with the Atlantis USX solution provided by Atlantis Computing, Inc.

The 200 virtual desktops are the first phase of a virtualised computing solution designed for 1,800 pupils and 200 staff members at the academy secondary school in West Berkshire, UK.

Kennet School had allocated more than two thirds of its IT budget for desktop PCs to meet the performance and capacity demands of its learning applications. With a virtualised VMware server environment already in place, the school wanted to virtualise its desktops and storage, but the cost of VMware’s virtualised SAN (vSAN) was prohibitively high.

The project was in severe jeopardy until the school’s IT partner, 4Way Solutions Ltd, recommended a hybrid SDS solution combining VMware Horizon View with USX.

“Without Atlantis Computing I don’t think we would have been able to move to a virtualised desktop environment at all,” said James Henderson, network administrator, Kennet School. “The cost of the alternative storage option was £40,000 more than Atlantis for the first 200 desktops alone and was simply too expensive for the school.“

The Atlantis solution accelerates performance. During proof of concept tests, the system developed by 4way Solutions recorded 124x faster IO/s performance than existing desktops. Log-on times reduced from 80s on traditional desktops to 25s on the new virtual PC environment.

Chris Plant, Atlantis Computing EMEA VP, said: “PC performance and scalability are critical to the delivery of effective teaching and learning programs. It’s great to see that the Atlantis USX virtual workspace solution serves such an instrumental role in making this happen for Kennet School.“

The solution also provides increased flexibility. If the school requires additional capacity for more virtual desktops, it requests an additional node for its existing platform rather than buying dedicated storage. USX’s de-duplication facilities have responded to the growing storage quota for users, which has doubled from 4GB to 8GB to accommodate the increasing needs of graphics-based packages, video and music applications.

Looking ahead, each additional virtualised desktop will cost Kennet School £284 vs. up to £800 for a replacement desktop PC.

“Rather than 70%, we now only need to allocate 40% of our IT budget to rolling out virtualised desktops, which enables us to divert nearly a third of our IT funding to new educational software and cloud services, helping us to deliver the best IT experiences that we possibly can for pupils and staff,” Henderson said.