Antelope Valley Union High School District Opts for Neuxpower

Neuxpower Solution announced that the Antelope Valley Union High School District has reclaimed 30 to 40 percent of its primary storage previously consumed by Microsoft Office and JPEG files by using Neuxpower NXPowerLite for File Servers. The Neuxpower file optimization solution, used by more than one million users worldwide, automates the reduction of the school district’s file bloat while generating reports detailing how storage was being used and the immediate savings obtained by optimizing files.

The Antelope Valley Union High School District covers a geographic area from the Los Angeles Forest in the south, to the Kern county line in the north, and from the Ventura/Kern county lines in the west, to the San Bernardino county line in the east. Over 23,600 high school students are educated in eight comprehensive and four continuation high schools, with additional educational opportunities offered by a Regional Occupation Program (ROP) and Adult Education campuses.

The School District manages twelve file servers across its fifteen locations and it was finding that a large amount of server space was consumed by extremely large Microsoft Office and JPEG files. Teachers and students were creating more and more bloated documents, presentations and images every day. As a result, the data growth was increasing storage management requirements and impacting the school district’s backup window.

"Backups were taking up to six hours at some of our sites," said Dan Stewart, director of information systems, Antelope Valley Union High School District. "Even with hardware being upgraded every two years, we were unable to keep up with demand. We knew that if we continued down the same path, we might lose control of our data growth."

That’s when the District began searching for new ways to reclaim storage, reduce backup windows and keep data growth in check. Antelope initially deployed ten licenses of Neuxpower’s NXPowerLite Desktop Edition to batch and optimize files on their servers. Experiencing benefits and long-term value the School District wanted to address its entire file server environment. Once NXPowerLite for File Servers became available Antelope implemented the solution which has enabled the District to automate manual processes and generate reports detailing how storage was being used and the savings obtained by optimizing files.

Once installed, NXPowerLite for File Servers enabled the district to reclaim 30 to 40 percent of storage consumed by Microsoft Office and JPEG files after the initial optimization run was completed in just three to four days. The software continues to run transparently on district servers on a monthly basis, optimizing any new files and reporting on current storage usage to keep data growth in check.

"NXPowerLite gives us smaller, optimized files that not only save on storage space, but are more usable and easier to email than the originals," said Stewart. "We have also been very happy with the visual quality of the optimized files and our users have been unable to tell the difference between the original and the optimized version."

"With the increased use of information technology in the classroom, today’s teachers and students are actively generating mountains of new content, however they don’t necessarily have the time or skills to manually optimize it," said Mike Power, CEO, Neuxpower. "As a result, the education sector often consumes far more storage than they need to. NXPowerLite is an ideal solution for technology-rich school districts like Antelope Valley Union High School District that need to remove file bloat without reducing file quality so that they may keep data growth and management costs under control."