Virtualize Me! K-12's Burgeoning Interest in Cost-Cutting, Productivity-Boosting Virtualization Technologies Has Vendors Starting to Take Notice
John K. Waters · T.H.E. Journal Technological Horizons in Education · 2009
JOHN ABDELMALAK, DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY for the School for the School District of the Chathams, was pretty sure it was time to jump on the virtualization bandwagon last year when he invited Dell to conduct a readiness assessment of his district's servers. When he saw just how little of their capacity was being used, he lost all doubt. was very, very low--3 to 5 percent, which is common in K-12;' says Abdelmalak. servers were really just sitting there waiting half the time. The Chathams is a district in New Jersey comprising the Chatham Borough and Chatham Township. It serves 3,700 students, who have access to 1,600 school PCs. Dell employed VMware software to monitor the physical servers the district had in place to see what kind of resources they were using in terms of disk I/0, and network, memory, and processor utilization. The software monitored 25 servers for one month, revealing their inactivity. Abdelmalak is one of many K-12 technology managers who are starting to regard virtualization as a must-have technology for their cash-strapped districts looking to do much more with much less. In response, vendors have begun targeting the K-12 market with specialized virtualization offerings. Dell is one of the most conspicuous, reaching out to potential customers with K-12-specific virtualization programs, and supporting them with targeted online resources. Nowadays, when schools begin to look at how to reduce costs and increase productivity, says Mark Weston, education strategist for Dell, those concerns drive them into a conversation about virtualization. Dell's approach, Weston explains, is to provide a portfolio of flexible, purpose-built virtualization servers, and storage products that run best-of-breed software from companies such as VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, PlateSpin, VisionCore, Stoneware, and others. Abdelmalak was won over at a virtualization workshop Dell sponsored in February 2008, one of many such sessions the company holds every few months. give us a chance to get together and basically learn about new technologies and how they affect education, he says. one I went to on virtualization really piqued my interest. Then last August, the Chathams district settled on a package that included Dell hardware bundled with VMware software. The district is now in the midst of replacing 30 physical servers with nine Dell host servers running VMware's ESX Server, the company's core hypervisor product. The hypervisor is the most basic virtualization component, a piece of software that abstracts the hardware--the microprocessor, memory, storage, and networking resources--and by doing so allows you to leverage the hardware to its fullest capacity. For us, it's a game-changer, Abdelmalak says of virtualization technology. excitement is high in our office because of the power of it. There's nothing that any of us has seen since we have been in this industry that has really revolutionized the server world quite like this. VMware, the company that started the revolution by reviving interest in technology once relegated to mainframes, has had K-12 in its sights for years. The goal of the VMware Academic Program, says Julia Austin, the company's senior director of research and development, is to provide support both for universities and K-12 districts, with discounted licenses for infrastructure and free software for teaching. VMware says 4,000 institutions are participating in its academic program, including universities and K-12 districts around the world. I've seen a major shift in K-12, Austin says. Tech managers and administrators are becoming savvier in understanding how to leverage this technology. When I started the academic program three years ago, there was a lot of educating to do, even at the university level. But now they're coming to us. They say, 'This is going to save us money, help us operate more efficiently,' and in a lot of cases they say that their students are asking for it. …