Green IT with DMD: A Solution for Pulaski County Schools

The relationship between DMD Data Systems, Inc. (DMD) and the Pulaski County School District began in the mid-1990’s for a state mandated project, implementation of the RS 6000. Because of this successful relationship, DMD became involved in a new project involving Active Directory.

Before Active Directory was deployed, each school was connected to its Wide Area Network through a combination of frame relay circuits and wireless connectivity. Speed inevitably became an issue, so the Kentucky Education Technology System initiated a plan requiring each school to run an administrative server and student server, thus creating an infrastructure of 55 IBM servers under management in the District.

The Challenge

Active Directory soon struggled to perform at frame relay speeds when the District was forced to move to gigabit fiber. By the end of 2003, the majority of their 55 servers were struggling to keep up and needed to be replaced. Knowing that it would cost upw ards of $160,000 to upgrade equipment, it was decided that a more effective use of their funding was to improve on their environment through the installation of VMware. This less expensive and “greener” alternative allowed the District to increase server efficiency and utilization while decreasing their total number of servers and minimizing loss in productivity due to down-time.

The Results

Installing VMware allowed for consolidation of one administrative server at each school to one virtual server. “This proved to work out exceptionally well.” said Robin Duffy, Network Administration Specialist at the District. “VMware is robust and highly stable, and we reduced the number of servers visible on the network from 55 to less than 20.” The District is also pleased with their substantial savings of more than $100,000 on the initial implementation, and another $80,000 one-year later on new hardware for their “Breakthrough to Literacy” program at all elementary schools.

Virtualization

“Overall, virtualization has been nothing short of spectacular in saving money and providing flexibility to meet the continuing needs of our district.” said Duffy. Moving to a service-based virtual architecture allowed for more server consolidation and simplifying network upkeep, to name a few.

BladeCenter

While virtualization and VMware was successful, efficient, and economical to their business, one issue remained. Space and energy usage became a new project to tackle for the multiple “pizza box servers” they had in place since the beginning of this relationship. Granted, the District was quite pleased with the initial consolidation of these servers, but the remaining life of this equipment was a concern. “Replacing this equipment with a BladeCenter has been a wonderful solution to the District’s growing needs.” said Duffy. It currently holds 90 percent of the data for their school system, and provides room for expansion in the future.

“When you consider we serve over 8,500 students and 2,000 staff using 3,500 workstations, having fewer than 10 physical servers powering everything is simply amazing! You get what you pay for.” said Duffy.

DMD can simply solve your IT challenges too. Contact us for details at dmd@dmddatasystems.com.