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“They can’t see servers and they can’t see switches and they can’t see cabling, but without all those things there, it’s a bit like building a house with poor foundations”
D
espite its 450-year history, King Edward VI School in Southampton is a future-forward independent day school with a modern approach to teaching its 970 pupils. Technology plays a strategic part in sustaining the school’s outstanding academic achievement – particularly
as catering for such a large number of learners with 106 teachers can have its challenges. “We’re about as close to the cutting-edge of education technology as we could be,” confirms Bob Allen, assistant head – digital strategy, who sits on the senior management team and has overall responsibility for IT. There are over 500 PCs on King Edward’s server network and
Allen and his team of just five support staff maintain a round-the-clock IT operation. Understandably struggling with the workload, the team recently implemented a workspace virtualisation solution that means all pupils and staff get their own personal desktop with the right apps in place on whichever of the school’s PCs they choose to log into. On the other side of the screen, the system also automates time-consuming back-end IT tasks, allowing the support team to focus on projects that help the school move forward – rather than wasting time fire-fighting. “The reasons for virtualisation were data security, continuity and change management, to make it easier for IT support departments to change from one system to another and to progress without having to do drastic down time,” says Allen. This move has improved system performance so that logon
times are 80% faster and application installation speeds have increased. This, in turn, provides a consistent user experience and increases user productivity. Network management is thus reduced by half.
A BIT OF BACKGROUND Allen and his team decided to go virtual around 18 months ago, to meet the demands of the school’s broad curriculum, which sees approximately 300 IT applications in use at any given time. But not every app is relevant to every user and the IT team wanted to avoid cluttering up desktops, which would also slow down the IT infrastructure. “What we were looking for was resilience and consistent user experience,” Allen remembers,
while allowing pupils and teachers to have everything they needed at the touch of a button. The IT team realised that its existing network management
software would struggle to meet the user’s demand for access to a wider number of applications. As a result, King Edward’s decided to review an alternative that would deliver a solution to meet the evolving requirements of staff and students. Allen explains: “It was vital that we could simplify the management of our network, including network control and administration of user profiles to deliver a more personalised IT service to end-users, while assuring the reliability of the IT infrastructure.”
SOLUTION IN PLACE Before going forward with a solution, Allen and his team visited Eastbourne College, which had already streamlined its desktop, user and IT service management. Impressed by what it saw, King Edward’s IT team settled on a new workspace virtualisation technology that would allow them to deliver, manage and secure the key elements of a user’s computing experience from one place, while also tailoring it to individuals’ needs. They progressed swiftly through a successful proof-of-concept to a full rollout free from end-user disruption. “The rollout could easily have been completed within a
month. However, a three-month process made it more manageable for the IT team, who still had to dedicate day-to-day support time to users,” says Allen. “As far as users were concerned, it was a seamless changeover and we didn’t need to alert them to the switchover from the old system as the process was so transparent.” His advice for other schools going through a similar
virtualisation and app-sharing transformation is: Don’t underestimate the underlying cost of the infrastructure – which often gets overlooked by senior management because they can’t physically see it. “They can’t see servers and they can’t see switches and they can’t see cabling, but without all those things there, then basically everything else you put on top of it is a bit like building a house with poor foundations,” says Allen. The end result has proven successful. “The new system has delivered precisely what we wanted, as staff and students can
www.edexec.co.uk / september 2013
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