Scale Computing for Education

Scale's ICOS is the perfect solution for schools and universities. It's full-featured functionality comes at no extra cost. When combined with quality commodity hardware, it delivers the most flexible, affordable, scale-out product for its price.

Watch the video to learn how the GEO Foundation saved hundreds of thousands of dollars when it combined Scale's storage products with its virtual desktop strategy to achieve a 1:1 student / computer ration two years ahead of schedule.

Schools are under pressure to provide updated technology to students. But as schools attempt to provide updated computers, networks and storage, they strain already tight budgets. At the same time, schools have a strong responsibility to protect student data from loss or intrusion. These factors create heavy financial burdens and crushing overhead for IT departments.

Scale's Intelligent Clustered Operating System™ (ICOS) builds effective solutions that meet education's distinct challenges. Scale's software creates third generation grids for schools while commodity hardware keeps it extremely cost-effective. Its powerful but affordable grid-based software goes to work immediately to give education the storage and data protection resources it needs.

True to its name, Scale is highly scalable. Educational institutions can cost-effectively build rich computing infrastructure over time, working within their budget and performance needs. The base Scale storage cluster starts at 3 TB and painlessly scales in increments of 1 TB or more. This architecture enables education IT to easily add grid-based storage by simply plugging in additional nodes. The nodes scale automatically without compromising performance, migrating data or disrupting services. All of this scalability and power has a price tag at a fraction of the cost of competing storage products. And the energy-efficient nodes enable education to stay green and save significant money on power and cooling costs.

Scale ICOS Benefits for Education

• Extremely cost-effective and powerful storage benefits tight education budgets.
• Highly scalable systems let education invest in technology as-needed.
• Third generation grid-based computing lets education assign compute and storage resources where they need it and when they need it.
• Highly scalable storage system lets education provide up-to-the-minute resources to a hungry student population.
• Strong data protection preserves confidential work products and academic records.

Scale for the Education Industry: Powerful Storage on a Limited Budget.

Educational institutions are charged with teaching technology and using it as a valuable learning tool. But because of the education industry's severe budget challenges, many students have only a cursory education in technology. This sad scenario holds true from the youngest grade levels all the way up to higher education.

What education needs is a way to deploy enterprise-class technology at an entry-level budget. But enterprise computing features like grid-based storage, hardware redundancy, advanced data protection, and high availability only come with high price tags — or they did up until now. With next-generation storage and storage management from Scale Computing, schools can provide the upgraded technology they need for an extremely reasonable price. And when schools combine Scale solutions with technology like affordable desktop virtualization, they can realize rich computing on an enterprise scale.

How Scale Computing Works

Scale's Intelligent Clustered Operating System™ (ICOS) is a powerful solution for education's tough challenges. Scale's powerful software creates next-generation grids for schools while commodity hardware keeps it extremely cost-effective. Its powerful but affordable grid-based software goes to work immediately to give education the storage and data protection resources it needs.

This enables education industry IT to easily add grid-based storage by simply plugging in additional nodes. The nodes scale automatically without compromising performance, migrating data or disrupting services. All of this scalability and power has a price tag at a fraction of the cost of competing storage products. And Scale's energy-efficient nodes enable education to be environmentally responsible while saving dramatic dollars in power and cooling.

Indianapolis-based GEO Foundation sponsors charter schools in Indiana and Colorado. They also operate a statewide tutoring program and Charter School Service Center for charter school leaders. But GEO was suffering from its own success as its computing infrastructure strained to keep up with demands. Desktop purchasing was expensive and time-consuming to maintain, direct-attached storage was scattered throughout multiple schools, and patches and upgrades were difficult to do over an older network.

GEO had a small grant budget and needed a lot of bang for their buck. They researched multiple storage and virtualization vendors but quickly realized that the features they needed were not available at the price they could afford. Then GEO found Scale Computing and realized that they could deploy next-generation storage for huge benefits and savings. They also decided to partner with cost-effective Citrix XenServer for even more savings from server and desktop virtualization.

GEO decided on a 3-phase project: 1) deploy new storage and networking equipment into current infrastructure, 2) virtualize and consolidate current servers, and 3) virtualize desktops. Scale Computing offered the storage solution that would handle their growing needs without needing to migrate data or disrupt services, and would save them a tremendous amount of money in the process. Citrix XenServer would allow them to consolidate servers and server administration, and would enable them to deploy desktop virtualization.

The GEO Foundation saw immediate results and cost-savings. It took GEO all of 1 month to upgrade an entire school's computing infrastructure with Scale and Citrix. They smoothly transitioned all of their storage onto Scale solutions and retired/repurposed 14 servers. GEO has now turned to the third deployment phase of deploying thin client workstations. Because of the tremendous cost savings GEO has already realized, they will be able to provide thin client desktops to their students at an unheard-of 1:1 computer-to-student ratio.