Central Valley School District Migrates to TierPoint
The CVSD cloud is operated on the VMware vCloud Director platform providing a centralized platform for provisioning and management of virtual data centers and resources.
Introduction
Central Valley School District (CVSD) serves an 80-square mile area in Spokane Valley, Washington consisting of more than 12,600 students attending 22 schools and three learning centers. CVSD offers high quality academic and co-curricular programs for K-12 students, pre-school and a variety of learning support and highly-capable programs.
Faced with significant IT upgrade costs and tight budget constraints, Superintendent Ben Small needed to make decisions regarding the direction of IT spending for the next 5-10 years. After researching and presenting the options to the Board of Directors, it was agreed that migrating their physical systems, applications and data to the TierPoint cloud would not only save money but also improve application, network and security performance and capability to district staff, students and parents.
Challenges
CVSD was faced with a decision to either upgrade server hardware and the environmental control systems of the data center operated at the district offices, or find an alternative that would cost less. This led CVSD to look at the cloud as a way to reduce the capital expenses related to hardware and software renewal, upgrade and licensing cycles, continue supporting the applications and systems with reduced IT staffing, quickly show an improved system experience for end-users and be able to accomplish a migration to the cloud in four weeks before the start of the school year.
CVSD knew it needed to find a partner that had the appropriate cloud infrastructure and systems to handle the District’s critical production applications and the proper personnel and skillset to manage the new environment.
Solutions
CVSD met with and began evaluating cloud options with several cloud providers, ultimately choosing TierPoint, a recognized VMware vPowered service provider, due to operational experience, maturity, scalability, location and support.
TierPoint system engineers and security experts analyzed CVSD’s business requirements and existing infrastructure environment to put a migration plan in place. A total of 22 aging physical servers were converted to virtual equivalents. The conversion included multiple web, mail, database and education-specific applications all critical to daily operations.
Results
The implementation plan was carried out smoothly, efficiently and ontime. All district systems were operational before the first day of school.
While pricing wasn’t the only determining factor in CVSD’s decision, it played a large role. The solution provided a significant increase in IT scalability and quality of service while providing significant cost savings. “The move to TierPoint eliminates the expense of upgrading existing equipment every three to five years and allows our limited technology staff to focus on supporting our schools,” said Small. As new applications have been introduced, CVSD has been able to add and pay for only the capacity needed instead of spending limited funds to upgrade hardware and reducing software licensing headaches.
“We are very happy with the TierPoint cloud solution,” continued Curnow. “It has met and exceeded all the requirements we needed to accomplish. We look forward to a long and successful relationship with TierPoint.”
At A Glance
Industry
K-12 Public School District
Technology
Cloud Computing
Managed Services
Challenge
Keeping backend server technology fresh and affordable to keep pace with the growth of the district and its technology needs.
Solution
Cloud-based services to host all of the district’s physical servers, web filtering, intrusion prevention, application control, data leak prevention and secure remote access.
Results
The move to the cloud significantly increased the scalability of the district’s IT services, eliminating the need for costly upgrades to both hardware infrastructure and software licenses.
Website
cvsd.org
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