in its schools to help students build their technological skills. ... Falls School District needed powerful tower server
Central Falls School District Case Study
Pioneering school district chooses Lenovo ThinkServers for: • Significantly lower maintenance and electrical costs • Better responsiveness and efficiency of IT department • Surprising affordability
Dr. Fran Gallo
Please jo For an Open with the Super
Superintendent Dr. Fran Gallo, cordially invites parents, teachers a members to attend her Open Forum. Everyone will have the oppor what is going on in the district, ask questions, and make suggestion
2013 - 2014 September 19, 2013 - 6pm, Ella Risk October 17, 2013 - 6pm, Robertson January 9, 2014 - 6pm, CFHS March 13, 2014 - 6pm, Calcutt May 8, 2014 - 6pm, Veterans
High Performer: Central Falls School District is on the Fast Track Thanks to Lenovo School district deploys new hardware with the Lenovo ThinkServer TS130, ThinkPad X131e and ThinkPad Edge 430e for affordable, powerful computing.
Customer Profile Central Falls School District is an urban school district serving the community of Central Falls, Rhode Island. The district is comprised ofone high school, one middle school and four elementary schools, which totals approximately 2,700 students.
Introduction Central Falls School District is recognized and respected by other communities as a national blueprint for many of its urban education programs. The case study will focus on how the Lenovo ThinkServer TS130 is a powerful and highly affordable server solution that enables Central Falls School District to easily manage and maintain student virtual desktops across one middle school and four elementary schools. The case study will also briefly highlight the district’s positive experience with the ThinkServer RD430, ThinkPad X131e and ThinkPad Edge 430e and its pilot program for the ThinkCentre M72e “Tiny,” ThinkPad Tablet 2 and ThinkPad Twist.
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With the Lenovo ThinkServers, space requirements, electrical costs, and maintenance hours drop significantly, and responsiveness and efficiency increase dramatically
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Challenges Equipped with outdated technology, Central Falls School District sought to update the obsolete hardware systems in its schools to help students build their technological skills. As part of its technology transformation, Central Falls School District needed powerful tower servers to host 25-30 virtual desktop devices in its middle school and four elementary schools. Without room for another rack server and little space left in each school’s server closet, Central Falls School District requires compact, quiet tower servers that have the flexibility of being housed in an office or class rooms the district does not have a dedicated systems engineer or the budget to hire one, they require a solution that can be easily maintained by someone who is not a systems engineer, eliminating the need to outsource this work. Finally, as an urban school district, Central Falls has to remain very price conscious as budgets are extremely tight. They need a very affordable server that still meets all of these requirements.
Situation Hired at the start of the 2012-2013 school year as Assistant Superintendent of Academic Data and Technology, Michael St. Jean began an aggressive plan to rapidly and affordable transform the district’s outdated hardware, streamline systems management and consolidate its servers, systems and software.
Michael St. Jean Assistant Superintendent of Academic Data and Technology Central Falls School District
Concurrently, the Rhode Island Department of Education selected Lenovo’s ThinkPad X131e as its preferred wireless enabled device for K-12 in the state, prompting St. Jean to test the device. He was very impressed with the build and quality and began looking at the rest of the Lenovo product line to fulfill the district’s technology needs. St. Jean began searching fora potential host server to support the schools’ virtual desktops and the LenovoThinkServer TS130 satisfied all of his criteria.
Solution With an Intel® Xeon™processor, 16GB of RAM, a 500GB HDD and dual 1GB NICs, the ThinkServer TS130 provides all the power Central Falls School District needs to run its virtual desktop devices. “The ThinkServer TS130 is unmatched in performance, pricing and stainability,” said Michael St. Jean, Assistant Superintendent of Academic Data and Technology. “The server operates in near silence, so it gives us the luxury of placing the machine in an office or classroom unnoticed. Priced at hundreds of dollars less than other competitive machines, the TS130 provides amazing value and powerful specs without compromising the district’s budget.” St. Jean was so pleased with the initial trial of the TS130running NComputing’sVSpace Server that he installed 18 Lenovo ThinkServer TS130s over a three week period to power 450 virtual desktops across five schools for the students in grades PK-8. When the district needed a new rack mount server to replace its aging finance servers in the business office, St. Jean turned to Lenovo again.“Like the TS130, the ThinkServer RD430 offers impressive specs at an astonishingly affordable price,” said St. Jean. When the district needed a powerful new rack mount server to replace and consolidate the business office’s three aging finance servers used for data, application and web, St. Jean turned to Lenovo again as a result of his experience with the ThinkServer TS130. Equipped with four Intel® Xeon™ processors, 24GB of RAM, 1TB HDD Space just one ThinkServer RD430 had enough power to replace the three old servers. The Lenovo ThinkServer RD430 cost St. Jean only half of his budgeted price, even with three years of onsite service included. With the savings, St. Jean was able to add a second RD430 to the order, which he used to replace multiple old servers and consolidate all employee home directories, shared directories and backup and recovery services. “Like the TS130, the ThinkServer RD430 offers impressive specs at an astonishingly affordable price,” said St. Jean.” “It was a breeze to configure the ThinkServer RD430 with the ThinkServer Easy Startup software,” said St. Jean. “From a smaller district standpoint, the ease of setup and manageability was a welcome change.” With its intuitive interface, Lenovo’s ThinkServer Easy Startup software provides quick configuration and setup for rapid deployment, even for non-technically inclined users.
Results The virtual desktop model coupled with the ThinkServer TS130 replaces hundreds of old tower model stand-alone computers. Therefore, IT only needs to support relatively few ThinkServer hosts versus hundreds of individual PCs. “With the Lenovo ThinkServers, space requirements, electrical costs, and maintenance hours drop significantly, and responsiveness and efficiency increase dramatically,” said St. Jean. St. Jean is also deploying various other Lenovo products in Central Falls School District, including 160 Lenovo ThinkPad X131e student laptops and 14 ThinkPad Edge 430e laptops for administrators. He is currently piloting the Lenovo ThinkCentre M72e “Tiny” as the school district’s next generation desktop, the ThinkPad Tablet 2 for special education case management and the ThinkPad Twist as part of an early elementary and community grant. “The price point, superior performance and ease of management are all indications that the Lenovo ThinkServers will be seamless for years to come, said St. Jean. “I fully intend to use Lenovo’s products and technology for the district’s full technology transformation.”
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Like the TS130, the ThinkServer RD430 offers impressive specs at an astonishingly affordable price.
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- Michael St. Jean
DataSheet
TS 130
M72e
Twist
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