Guest Blog Post By John Orbaugh; Director of Technology Services, Tyler Independent School District
(Part 3 in a series – continued from "A Christmas Story? – Making the Case for Virtual Desktops at Tyler ISD")
Making up a half million dollar budget loss right as we were ready to pull the trigger on the purchase of our virtual desktop solution isn’t the sort of job a lowly Technology Director can do alone. Having carefully laid the groundwork for the project over several months, where we proved the viability and value of the technology, began to pay off when I sat down with our CFO to discuss the budget situation and to being to look for a pool of funds I could…uh…”acquire” to move the project along. Since this was going to take some time to figure out I decided that we wouldn’t just sit still.
In the interim, while waiting on the financial mess to work out, I asked my staff to take another look at the second place solution. We were quite certain that VMware View was the best product for us, but since we were at a standstill why not take another look just to be sure. In fact, to step up the quality of the double check, we invited in a different consulting firm to show us the product. Maybe a different firm would be able to wow us to the extent that we’d have reason to rethink our position. Granted this was a bit of a hassle for my staff to deal with, but we had the courage of our convictions and time on our hands so why not give it a try. We had nothing to lose.
Having a second group of consultants for the other product turned out to be a great idea. They were able to show us the latest version and showcase their skill set for us. After taking a couple of weeks to consider their offering we concluded that our original decision was still the right one. We believed even stronger in our original conclusion that VMware View was the right decision for us. VMware still outshined the completion in the way our software performed on our antique PCs, in the ease of use of the management interfaces my staff would have to work in every day and the overall cost to implement.
Meanwhile, back in the world of district finances, my CFO had identified some potential funding sources that might get the project off high center. We met with the Superintendent and proposed using some excess funds that had been set aside by the Board of Trustees that ended up not being used, some interest earnings on some capital improvement bonds and Career and Technology funds that could be used for update their student computers. These funding pools coupled with the funds I’d been saving up for the project would be enough to fund the entire project. However, the Superintendent correctly pointed out a political reality that our community likely wouldn’t support the use of the bond related funds for technology. He suggested that we look at cutting the project back from the original 4,000 thin client to a level that would fit within the other remaining fund balance.
It wasn’t the news that I wanted to hear, but at the same time a little light was beginning to shine on our otherwise gloomy financial picture. I asked our consultant for VMware, INX Inc., to take another look at the project and restructure it for 2,500 units, but to do it in a way that would not harm us when we were financially able to grow to the full 4,000. That was a little tricky considering the interplay between servers, memory, storage and network, but they really came through for me. In a matter of days they had retooled the system and the new price actually gave me a little breathing room in the budget and didn’t compromise the future growth. That wasn’t the only surprise they had for me.
INX suggested that we consider purchasing the system as something called a Vblock. The Vblock turned out to be a managed, tested and supported set of Cisco UCS servers, EMC2 VNX tiered storage, VMware View and some other handy tools. The Vblock from VCE Inc. included one source for support and regular distribution of patches pre-tested to make sure that fixing one issue won’t break something else. After meeting with VCE and evaluating their service offering we decided that this was the best way forward.
I presented the final project cost and scope to the district’s Leadership Team. Upon getting the go ahead from the Superintendent the next stop was the Board of Trustees. I presented the project and contract for approval and received their unanimous support on the evening of April 11, 2011. Within a few minutes of the vote I texted my sales representative at INX, Stephen Untersee, “Time to get busy.” That little text message set off a flurry of activity that resulted in a large shipment of equipment and a whole passel engineers and installers arriving at my loading dock on June 27th.
And now…let the fun begin…
To be continued…
