The Bonneville Joint School District in Idaho is one of several K-12 school systems leveraging Virtual Iron to reduce power, cooling and space requirements and increase server utilization while supporting an ever increasing demand for computing services.

The seventh largest school system in Idaho, Bonneville serves approximately 9,300 students and employs more than 1,200 faculty and staff. The district has 12 elementary schools, three middle schools for grades 7-8 and three high schools for grades 9-12. The district also sponsors a school at the Behavioral Health Center and a K-8 charter school, and provides services for a comprehensive special education program. Lane Virgin, Bonneville’s system administrator has seen the addition of four new elementary schools in his six years with the school district. It is projected that in the next five years the school district will add two more elementary schools, a middle school and a high school. This rapid growth has created more and more pressure on the IT infrastructure and support team.

Virgin and the IT team at the school district support a variety of different systems and applications. The data center includes four server racks, two battery back-ups, more than 20 Dell Servers, two Gateway servers, two Dell EqualLogic SAN Arrays, one DVR, three Linux Servers, HP ProCurve Switches, Exchange 2007, print servers, application servers, file servers, IIS servers, Domain Controllers, and SQI servers.

During the summer of 2008 an HVAC and power upgrade was completed, bringing circuit power from 75 to 225 Amps. A natural gas generator was also added. In addition, the physical rack space in the data center was a growing problem since hardware would always be added to handle a new system or application. And, some servers were not even running at full potential and were very inefficient from a heating perspective. All of these issues and workloads were pushing the limits of the infrastructure — power, cooling, networking and administration. The IT infrastructure was simply not keeping pace as the school district’s need for computing power increased. The data center had become outdated.

In 2007, Lane Virgin began researching the available server virtualization technologies. He was then introduced to Virtual Iron and quickly realized how clean and easy to use the Virtual Iron design was. Lane dove in immediately and within ten minutes had Virtual Iron’s virtualization management platform, VI-Center, installed on a Dell 1855 Blade Server. According to Lane, he “never looked back” once he started using Virtual Iron.

Today, Virtual Iron, in concert with Dell servers and Dell/EqualLogic storage is providing the school department’s IT team with a proven and cost-effective server virtualization platform that delivers a number of benefits including:
- Significant server consolidation
- Faster provisioning and deployment of new systems
- Business continuity for all applications
- Reduced administrative time, effort and expense

For the complete case study, click here.

Healthcare is another strong segment for server virtualization and Virtual Iron. Healthcare providers are continually looking for ways to reduce unnecessary expense. At the same time, technology has become an increasingly integral part of the healthcare process – from patient care, to records management, to the digitization of patient data. All this puts immense pressure on healthcare providers’ IT systems and data centers.

Northern Berkshire Health (NBH) in Western Massachusetts is a great example of a provider that has leveraged server virtualization to address these challenges. The hospital is streamlining its IT infrastructure, consolidating its server footprint and reducing its power, cooling and space requirements with server virtualization. Equally important, NBH has significantly reduced the complexity of its environment.

One of the most visible and symbolic reminders of the impact of server virtualization at NBH: a three-tier, 8’ x 8’ tower of 30 rack mount servers has been reduced to a 2’ x 8” blade system with just four blades. As evidence of the total business impact: NBH has reduced its IT budget by 10% each of the last two years. At the same time, it has increased its computing capacity by 20% each year. Server virtualization has played a key role here. NBH is also using Virtual Iron to simplify its back-up and disaster recovery infrastructure. Using a combination of server virtualization and a Storage Area Network (SAN), NBH get’s all the security of tape without giving up any accessibility.

For more details on NBH’s server virtualization implementation, click here.

Virtual Iron has been deployed by a number of higher ed institutions to streamline their IT infrastructure, reduce power and cooling and support business continuity efforts.

One very recent example is the Computer Science Department at UMass Lowell. This group is leveraging Virtual Iron to create a more flexible IT infrastructure and to meet the increasing academic/research computing needs of its faculty and students. Virtual Iron provides the department’s IT group with a reliable and cost-effective server virtualization platform that delivers a number of important current and future benefits including:
- 4 to 1 server consolidation ratios
- Reductions in power and cooling to support its green computing efforts
- Optimization of both its x86 server and desktop computing environment
- Cost-effective high availability and disaster recovery
- A streamlined test and development process
- Fast and easy recoverability in event of failure

To view the complete case study, click here.

ZDNet.com recently had the chance to speak with the Director of Technology at Maryland-based law firm Goodell DeVries Leech & Dann. The firm is using server virtualization to improve its business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. The writer, Dan Kusnetsky, covered topics such as why the firm selected Virtual Iron, what benefits they have received and what advice they would give other users. The complete story appears here.

You wouldn’t know it from all the hype, but the reality is that server virtualization is still only deployed on about 6-8% of the installed x86 server base worldwide today. To take the value of server virtualization to the next level requires that we in the industry find a way to gain greater adoption in the small and medium-sized enterprises. To date, these organizations have been largely shut out of the market for true virtualization by the high cost and complexity of available solutions on the market.

At Virtual Iron, we certainly believe that we are helping to change that reality. New solution alternatives like Virtual Iron’s that deliver comprehensive, easy-to-use features in a cost-effective package along with better market awareness and broader distribution worldwide are enabling organizations of all sizes to realize the true benefits of fully-featured server virtualization.

Two Virtual Iron customers – both small professional services firms - recently shared their experience with server virtualization. One is on track to save over $100,000 in its first year as a result of reduced server purchases, power and cooling and data center infrastructure costs. The other is using virtualization for business continuity and fast recoverability – enabling it to have its systems back up and running in minutes instead of days in the event of a failure.

Whether you’re interested in Virtual Iron or any other solution, these two users offer some valuable insights on things to consider when planning your own virtualization project. You can view the webcast here.

Virtual Iron has become the server virtualization solution of choice for K-12 school systems. This blog describes how the Emanuel County School System, a rural school district in Georgia, is using Virtual Iron. The next entry profiles the Pawtucket School Department, an urban school district across the US.

Emanuel County is located 90 miles west of Savannah, Georgia. It covers almost 700 square miles in east-central Georgia and is home to just over 22,000 residents. While the area is largely rural, the county school district puts a high priority on developing strong educational programs and it views information technology as an important enabler for achieving this goal. The school system educates 4,500 students in eight schools covering pre-K through 12th grade.

As the school system has grown, it has put increasing pressure on its IT systems. The district moved into a new centralized data center, bought new, more powerful servers and, for a short time, resolved its problems. But, as the county, its school system, and its IT needs continued to grow, the school system quickly outgrew the capacity of its new data center. Where it started with 20 servers, Emanuel County quickly added more to meet increasing demand. This created significant power and space issues. There was pressure to add additional servers as well, but retrofitting the data center to accommodate that growth was a very expensive proposition. This led to a decentralized architecture with seven different locations each housing three to four servers supporting the school district. The root cause of this server sprawl was the low utilization of the school system’s existing server infrastructure. Each server was dedicated to a single application running, in most cases, at less than 15% utilization. This was a clear indication that implementing server virtualization would pay significant dividends in terms of both OpEx and CapEx savings.

ECSS looked at several vendors, including VMware, but deemed it too expensive and too complex. They also tested both Citrix XenSource and Novell Xen, but did not feel the capabilities in these solutions were comprehensive enough to meet its needs. These solutions also required Linux command line programming which introduced unnecessary complexity for the ECSS IT staff. They then learned about Virtual Iron, and after extensive internal testing, found it much easier to use and afford.

Today, with the help of server and storage virtualization from Virtual Iron and LeftHand Networks, ECSS has streamlined its data center, reducing its number of servers from 38 to 18, with half of those servers part of a hot backup site for disaster recovery. With this consolidation, the school system has not only reduced its power and cooling costs, but also avoided the physical labor, capital expenses and server outages that would have resulted from retrofitting its existing data center with additional cooling and power outlets.

The school district is running Windows and Linux workloads side by side on the same servers. Typical Windows workloads being virtualized include the district’s e-mail archive system, Zenworks Configuration Management, and eDirectory services. Typical Linux workloads include Novell OES2, SASI Student Information System and Novell GroupWise. Emanuel County and SSI report no performance degradation on those workloads.

The Pawtucket School Department in Rhode Island is leveraging server virtualization as a core foundation to streamline its IT infrastructure and reduce its capital and operating expenses.

The school department serves over 9000 students and 1300 faculty and staff, throughout 17 schools and an administration building. With reduced city and state aid to education, there is never enough money to support the technology and the related services required by its constituents.

Mike St. Jean, the school department's Director of Technology, has used creativity and resourcefulness to deliver a high level of IT services across the entire school district. Over the past few years, under Mike’s leadership, the school department shifted its district-wide technology model and resources from a traditional client-server model to thin client and server based computing model.

As a result, the Pawtucket School Department has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars while greatly increasing access, services, security, and manageability compared to traditional desktop computers. However, this new architecture introduced its own new set of challenges. One negative byproduct has been the sheer amount of server sprawl that has resulted. For example, each high school has one Novell Netware workgroup server and six Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 (Win2K3) terminal servers. Each junior high school has one Netware and four Win2K3 Terminal Servers. Each elementary school has one Netware and one to two Win2k3R2 terminal servers. The Administration Building houses an additional twenty or so terminal, workgroup, web, communications, data, and application servers. District-wide the IT staff maintains eighty servers, supporting 2000 workstations, 1600 of which are dedicated thin clients, with a need for further expansion. Clearly, the environment was ripe for server virtualization and consolidation.

In early 2007, St. Jean set out to research server virtualization technologies. He looked at every available option in detail, testing them himself to form his own opinions. Eventually, Mike got around to testing Virtual Iron. He downloaded the Virtual Iron free trial. Within ten minutes he had the Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager installed and was off and running. This trial was so encouraging and the management capabilities so intuitive and robust that, after reviewing all the available alternatives, St. Jean and his IT staff decided Virtual Iron was the best product, period. Even though it cost more than the free products, it had additional performance and management capabilities that the School District simply could not live without. But this cost was still significantly less than comparable offerings by VMware or Citrix.

According to St. Jean, “ based on the success of these trials, the IT staff plans to cut the district’s 36 physical school-based terminal servers in half due to Virtual Iron’s ability to provide additional management, provisioning, backup, and archiving capabilities. Another benefit is that the IT staff will be able to reduce the electrical and cooling requirements of each school’s central wiring and server closets. This is a significant factor in very old, cramped school buildings, with older infrastructure.”

With a small initial investment, the dedicated IT staff at Pawtucket School District has been able to build gradually, absorbing technologies and expanding capacity as budgets allow. One of the things that the team liked best about Virtual Iron is that it provided it with the ability to start small and to scale fast. Going forward, there are also another dozen or so services targeted for virtualization over the next year as the administration center adds additional managed nodes.

Just as the Pawtucket School Department’s IT staff shifted from a traditional client-server model to thin client infrastructure to realize substantial cost savings and management efficiencies, it is looking to leverage Virtual Iron as a core foundation solution to take CapEx and OpEx savings and management efficiencies to the next level. In St. Jean's words, "Virtual Iron is budget friendly to cash-starved school districts, easy to setup, use and maintain for time-limited IT staff, and is stable, high performing, and secure to meet the exponentially growing technology needs of students, faculty, and administration."

SearchServerVirtualization posted a Podcast on their site highlighting how seven of Virtual Iron's rapidly growing family of customers are deploying Virtual Iron to reduce their capital and operating expenses and improve their ability to better align their IT operations with their business goals.

The customers featured in this podcast are a diverse group, representing a broad set of industries and business models, including professional services, health care delivery, retail, software as a service (SaaS), ecommerce, media and publishing and IT services. They can be found across the US, Canada and Europe. Some are well known, some are not. They range from one person, Windows–only IT shops running iSCSI SAN arrays and a limited number of workloads in test and staging environments to large, sophisticated IT departments running a variety of Windows Server and Linux OS guests and a broad range of demanding workloads in production environments with mixed Fiber Channel and iSCSI SAN arrays.

Despite the wide variances outlined above, these organizations all have something very fundamental in common – a strong desire to take full advantage of the well-documented operational and economic benefits of server virtualization in a way that is both affordable and easy to manage. The Podcast is available here. Please note that it sits on a third-party site and does require registration. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Hobsons EMT, which provides customizable, Web-based software solutions for higher education, is using server virtualization to enhance its data center efficiency and increase service levels while reducing power and cooling and cutting costs in the process. Patrick McFadin, director of engineering, spoke recently to InfoWorld about how Hobsons is using server virtualization, why they selected Virtual Iron over VMware and lessons learned about best practices for implementation. Links to the podcast are available here.

A new customer story is available on our web site:

New Jersey Sharing Network is leveraging server virtualization software from Virtual Iron to increase server utilization, quickly and easily provision new systems for users, and to reduce power, cooling and space requirements in its data center. Virtual Iron provides a very effective and easy to use alternative to VMware that improves the organization’s ROI and enables it to expand its server virtualization initiative.

Download the New Jersey Sharing Network case study [PDF].