Citrix VDI-in-a-Box helps Medina City Schools cut costs and stretch budgets
Medina City Schools in Medina, Ohio is a K-12 school district with approximately 7,600 students. The district is currently implementing an e-learning model.
The challenge: Reduce costs of refreshing and maintaining PCs
Like many other school districts, Medina is concerned about the impact of repeated budget cuts and wants to permanently reduce costs. “Refreshing PCs every few years is expensive and time-consuming. We looked at desktop virtualization to lengthen our refresh cycles and streamline support costs,” explains Jack Howell, manager of IT infrastructure at Medina City Schools .
The results: VDI-in-a-Box delivers ease of access and administration—and saves thousands
After performing a formal VDI pilot of various options, Medina chose Citrix® VDI-in-a-Box™ for its ease and affordability. “We have more than 600 devices in our labs and another 300 devices of different types including iPads in the classroom and for administrative use. Patching, updating and troubleshooting these was time-consuming and expensive,” explains Howell. “With Citrix VDI-in-a-Box, we simply use master images for our desktop pools and leverage automated policies to propagate updates across all the desktops.”
Citrix VDI-in-a-Box simplifies ongoing management by providing a centralized wizard-driven interface. It also makes it easy for the district to scale up its systems: all administrators need to do is add more servers to the Citrix VDI-in-a-Box grid. “In addition to conserving administrative time and resources, . Citrix VDI-in-a-Box saves our district thousands of dollars on hardware purchases each year because it enables us to lengthen our PC refresh cycles and redeploy old hardware with the VDI architecture,” concludes Howell.
About Citrix
Citrix® VDI-in-a-Box™ is a an all-in-one VDI software appliance that enables Windows® administrators to deliver centrally managed virtual desktops to any user, anytime, on any device – for less than the cost of new PCs. VDI-in-a-Box eliminates over 60 percent of traditional VDI infrastructure – including management servers and shared storage (SANs) – by integrating connection brokering, desktop provisioning, load balancing and user profile management, and leveraging off-the-shelf servers with direct-attached storage. Servers can be connected to form a highly available grid, which scales simply by adding more servers; the grid automatically load balances and manages high availability.
About Citrix VDI-in-a-Box
Citrix VDI-in-a-Box is a an all-in-one VDI software appliance that enables Windows® administrators to deliver centrally-managed virtual desktops to any user, anytime, on any device – for less than the cost of new PCs. VDI-in-a-Box eliminates over 60% of traditional VDI infrastructure – including management servers and shared storage (SANs) – by integrating connection brokering, desktop provisioning, load balancing, and user profile management, and leveraging off-the-shelf servers with direct-attached storage. Servers can be connected to form a highly-available grid, which scales simply by adding more servers; the grid automatically load balances and manages high-availability.
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Desktop Solution Needs
- Lengthen PC refresh cycles
- Reuse old hardware
- Cut desktop support costs
- Enable students access using any device including iPads
Key Benefits
- Lengthened PC refresh cycles by 2x
- Reduced desktop management cycles by over 50%
- Saved thousands of dollars by re-deploying old hardware management
- Increased student access using a variety of devices including iPads
Networking Environment
- Dell R710 Dual 8-core processors with 96GB RAM, 6x15K RPM Internal SAS drives
- Citrix VDI-in-a-box
- Access Windows desktops via HP thin clients, and leveraged desktop PCs
