Innovation happens when we work together. This rings particularly true for VMware partner, Rolta AdvizeX, and their client, a public school district in the Northwestern U.S. When AdvizeX began working with the district, they found a couple of serious problems around operational productivity involving the end-user computing stack. Year after year, the district would have to plug and unplug computers with terrible inefficiencies.
So, how did AdvizeX work to resolve this problem? By taking a holistic view into how the district was delivering the desktop experience to students. This approach allowed AdvizeX to determine that the district needed to completely revamp with a virtual desktop—thus an introduction to VMware Cloud Foundation was made. Adopting Cloud Foundation made the lives of those in the district much simpler by giving them push-button capabilities enabling them to update hosts, storage, management components, and software-defined networking solutions, all with a single click.
Other solutions required a more hands-on approach. Originally, the school district’s environment was set up for 3,000 concurrent users. The customer came to AdvizeX requesting an immediate expansion due to an influx of ESL (English as a Second Language) students. VMware Cloud Foundation allowed AdvizeX to get the infrastructure up and ready to go in less than a week’s time. By moving to Cloud Foundation, every time the school district purchased a node, they acquired both compute and storage to add to the pool. This allowed the school district to grow their environment seamlessly—whenever they wanted to add a new storage frame, they could do so with incremental costs as new students were added.
VMware Cloud Foundation’s biggest value offer for the school district was the ability to quickly and easily segment desktop traffic. Previously, with desktops scattered throughout the district, school decision-makers had trouble preventing the lateral spread of malware and viruses between computers that students used. Using VMware Horizon on top of Cloud Foundation, AdvizeX was able to leverage VMware NSX to provide east-west firewalling with one firewall rule to prevent any desktop-to-desktop communication inside of it.
The benefits to the district were two-fold. The first was a reduction in CAPEX (capital expenditure). AdvizeX saw a 15% decrease in cost-per-desktop from the converged infrastructure when leveraging VMware Cloud Foundation. From an OPEX (operational expenditure) standpoint, AdvizeX found that there was a 50% increase in effectiveness for desktop technicians. Instead of plugging and unplugging traditional computers, technicians were able to simply put in a zero or thin client and have it ready to go.
You can hear even more about AdvizeX and VMware’s partnership from our partner, Joe Clarke, principal architect at Rolta AdvizeX. In a short video, he details how VMware Cloud Foundation makes life easier for their customers – watch now! And if you’re looking to see Cloud Foundation in action for yourself, register today for our Hands-on Lab!
