Northeast Texas School District With EMC VNX and VCE

EMC Corporation
announced that Tyler Independent
School District (Tyler ISD), the largest school district in Northeast
Texas, selected EMC and VCE solutions to transform how it builds, operates and
delivers IT services to meet its educational needs of its more
than 20,000 students and staff across 27 schools.

Using a VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platform – comprising EMC VNX unified
storage, Cisco UCS blade servers and VMware vSphere and VMware View – Tyler ISD
has transformed its IT infrastructure,
operations and people to maximize the value of technology inside and outside
the classroom.

Customer Benefits:

• 
  Return on Investment: Tyler ISD will realize cost savings of $1.3
  million in the first year, and $3 million over five years compared with its old
  IT model.
• Responsiveness: IT staff can deploy new IT services in minutes based on
  the dynamic needs of the district.
• Efficiency: Tyler ISD has
  streamlined IT administration activities, allowing IT staff to spend more time
  training teachers and students on how to maximize the value of technology
  inside and outside the classroom.
• IT Value: IT staff is
  evolving from technicians focused on troubleshooting to strategic IT
  specialists who are aligned with the education process.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
Looking to expand students’ ability to learn beyond a seven-hour school
day, five days a week, Tyler ISD’s school environment needed to transform its
IT infrastructure and become a 24×7 operation with opportunities for learning
across numerous media and devices for improving students’ ability to learn
anytime and anywhere.

To address the need for change, Tyler ISD engaged VCE and EMC Velocity partner
Presidio to transform its IT environment to a virtualized data
center to provide its students with technology services to help foster
learning. As part of its transformation, it has redefined the role of
technology in the classroom, refocusing staff from being technicians focused on
maintenance and troubleshooting to becoming IT specialists with a vested stake
in the education process.

John Orbaugh, Director of Technology, Tyler Independent School District, said: "The school environment today is rapidly
becoming a 24×7 operation. We transformed our IT environment allowing us to
focus on making technology more accessible and flexible so that when students
are ready to learn, explore and grow, the tools and information are
there-whether they’re in the classroom or at home."

"Our virtualized IT infrastructure
has freed our staff from spending the majority of their time performing
maintenance and troubleshooting tasks and enabled them to shift their focus on
more strategic initiatives. As an example, it used to take 200 hours annually
to update all of the PCs in the district. Now, we’re able to change one image
and reboot all of our virtual desktops automatically – freeing up time to help
faculty and staff better to access and leverage technology services in a more
natural, meaningfully and easy way."

"We firmly believe that
accessing and using IT services should be as easy as breathing. Having a new IT
model that drives automation allows us to dedicate more resources to develop
new applications and services such as using smart phones and other mobile
devices to streamline some of the more mundane tasks for teachers, including
taking attendance, which allows them to focus on educating the students instead
of administrative tasks."

"Since adopting this virtual
infrastructure, our jobs in IT have become a lot more dynamic and exciting.
We’re more than just technologists now. Our projects are now focused on
affecting the lives of students for the rest of their lives, rather than just
simply swapping out a hard drive for example."

"We compared the cost of doing
things the old way, before we transformed our IT infrastructure, which would
involve replacing our physical computers every few years, instead delivering
virtual desktops from our existing hardware. The ROI analysis showed that we
will save an astonishing $1.3 million in just one year and more than $3 million
over five years."