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Category Archives: Education

Pearson, a Leading Learning Company, Validates Educational Solutions with VMware View

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Screen shot 2012-06-25 at 9.29.59 AM
Posted by Laurynas
Kavaliauskas
Alliance Systems Engineer

Once upon a time, schools relied only on books to support classroom learning. Today, Pearson’s SuccessMaker and Waterford Early Learning digital programs provide elementary and middle school learners with adaptive, personalized paths to master essential reading, math and science concepts. They also deliver outcome-based data—electronically—to inform educational decision-making.

Educators praise these advancements, but rapidly changing technology has made it difficult for schools to retain control and still provide access flexibility taking full advantage of Pearson’s award-winning solutions. Today’s K-12 administrators are looking for ways to keep improving how students learn while reducing costs and maintaining the highest quality educational resources. Fortunately, an ideal solution is now available.

Pearson customers now can deploy and use both SuccessMaker and Waterford Early Learning on the VMware View end user computing platform. VMware View is designed to deliver the entire desktop—operating system, applications and end-user data—using multiple types of clients (e.g., thick, thin and zero clients), reducing IT investments. The virtual desktop platform also improves application up time, decreasing system maintenance requirements.

Pearson and VMware recently completed the testing to validate both Pearson SuccessMaker and Waterford Early Learning solutions with VMware View. View the testing details, as well as the advantages, technical considerations and recommendations for using each solution. Figure 1 shows a typical architecture for deploying these Pearson programs with VMware View.

Figure 1. VMware View is Fully Compatible with Pearson’s SuccessMaker and Waterford Early Learning Programs
Pearson

Schools Benefit from Pearson-VMware Relationship
With VMware View, K-12 schools can significantly reduce the time and effort they spend on IT maintenance for desktop support. For example, when a student’s desktop malfunctions or fails, VMware View enables a designated administrator to reset the desktop to its original image, rapidly and remotely in minutes, with no direct intervention.

In addition to time and cost savings, the easy-to-deploy VMware View solution enables K-12 schools to:

  • Increase control by providing centralized and automated management of VMware View Virtual Desktop components
  • Gain freedom of choice by delivering rich, personalized virtual desktops as a managed service to many types of clients—thick, thin, and zero clients—anywhere and at any time
  • Improve performance and uptime while providing a flexible, high-performance desktop experience for end users across a variety of network conditions

For Pearson customers, it’s happily ever after with VMware View. To learn more, download the Deployment and Technical Considerations Guide.

Lone Star College System Moves to the Head of the Class with VMware, Cisco & EMC

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Link Alander Link Alander
Posted by Link Alander, LSCS, Associate Vice
Chancellor for Technology Services and Pearl Goitia,
VMware, Sr. Customer Reference Manager

When an organization is in the throes of a large virtualization initiative, it’s sometimes hard to remember the beginning. That isn’t the case at Lone Star College System (LSCS) where Link Alander, Associate Vice Chancellor for Technology Services, is crystal clear on how they got started, the goals they have achieved and what they have left to accomplish. I recently caught up with Link Alander to ask a few questions about how things are going at LSCS.

VMware: Tell us about LSCS and the number of students you support.

Link Alander: LSCS is a publicly funded, two-year community college located in Houston. It’s the largest institution of higher education in the area and the largest community college system in Texas. We’ve had tremendous student population growth in six years. Today, LSCS has 78,000 “traditional” students pursuing two-year associate degrees from multiple campus locations. We also provide educational opportunities to 23,000 “nontraditional” enrollees through nondegree courses and adult education programs.

VMware: What challenges were you looking to overcome that led you to consider virtualizing your datacenters?

Alander:  When our new CIO, Shah Ardalan came on board in February 2008, LSCS already had a small VMware installation. I was tasked to redesign our core systems. Instead of supporting a confederation of multiple sites, I wanted us to move to a consistent, centralized model for all IT services, which meant reining in our six campus sites, as well as the eight smaller satellite centers that accessed our data, but couldn’t afford their own datacenters. Our team believed that virtualizing the majority of our physical servers was critical in order to efficiently manage the centralized environment and provide high availability for our key campus applications. We started at about 5 percent virtualized and have quickly moved to 93 percent virtualized.

You can hear Link describe our progress at LSCS in some detail:

VMware:  Why did you subsequently choose the VMware, Cisco and EMC solution?

Alander:  We evaluated Microsoft’s Hyper V, but it was very immature compared to VMware vSphere. When we completed a virtualization assessment to evaluate the consolidation opportunities and calculate the potential savings, the ROI on a joint VMware, Cisco and EMC solution spoke for itself and we got approval to move all of our campuses to the new environment quite easily.

VMware: What advantages has the VMware, Cisco and EMC solution provided to LSCS?

Alander: There are many, but let me give you one example. LSCS is committed to guaranteeing “five nines” availability for Tier-1 applications. VMware, Cisco and EMC provided the only solution that could provide the high availability we required. Now, we have virtualized nearly every Tier-1 and -2 application, including our new ERP system, Active Directory, Exchange, and SQL. We’ve also built a private cloud, which has enabled us to achieve greater elasticity and flexibility.

VMware: What impact has the VMware, Cisco and EMC solution brought to your IT infrastructure?

Alander: We’ve experienced tremendous benefits from improving operational flexibility and efficiency to improving environmental savings. We’ve dramatically reduced deployment times, achieved high availability and improved disaster recovery. On the cost side, we’ve achieved significant savings in power, space and cooling. We’ve obtained ROI in just three years and nine months—and we’ve reduced hardware and capital costs by about $600,000, which is a tremendous improvement.

VMware: Thank you for your time, Link. We hope to catch up with you again next year at VMworld.