Virtualization Goes to Class

By VSM News Staff
published: Friday, April 11 2008

The following is an interview with DynTek Regional Sales Manager, Joe Rubino, and Network Administrator of Cohoes City School District in Cohoes, New York, Mark DiPofi, about Cohoes’ choice to implement virtualization.

MD: Yes. As a network administrator, my daily tasks are providing all the computer needs to the staff and students, including meeting state and federal mandates. As a rule, Cohoes views its technology infrastructure not only as a foundation for systems and applications, but also a platform for learning. So much of the critical communication between faculty and students, depends on a solid infrastructure, from curriculum and grades to attendance and behavior reports.

MD: Cohoes was looking at a new attendance package to meet the state mandate period-by-period attendance. While looking at this, we were trying to find a cost-effective solution for future growth and needs. We required more servers, disk space. In order to meet the technology incentives laid out before us, we needed to create a more secure, consolidated server environment. In addition, the district was also turning to technology to help enhance physical security by placing video surveillance cameras in the hallways and around the school perimeter. The district had an aging multi-platform infrastructure that limited our capacity and we moved to VMware to enhance our storage capacity and give us the redundancy necessary in the future for growth.

JR: DynTek is really a leading provider for professional technology services to mid-market companies, and our focus in our Albany marketplaces is really on state and local governments, educational institutions and a few of the local, commercial entities. We provide really a broad range of IT security, unified communications, virtualization capabilities, Microsoft Information Worker and delivery solutions that wrap around the products that we’re authorized for. We really offer a multi-disciplinary approach that allows our clients to turn to a single storage for critical technology requirements. For example, we have strategic partnerships with industry leaders who share many of the same goals as our customers and our commitment to the long term strategic relationships. They include partners such as VMware, McAfee, Citrix, Microsoft, Novell, Cisco and HP. We’re recognized by these partners at some of the highest authorization levels because we do make the commitment to get our sales folks trained, we offer some of the best technical capabilities to our customers, and recent customer support initiatives, such as our IT Care, not only help our customers on the front end of the sales cycle, but post-implementation, we offer the customer a wide array of services to continue their operations. DynTek provides complete end-to-end services for all of your virtual infrastructure project needs. We have highly accredited, certified consultants consisting of industry-leading experts with a focus on development of outstanding services, solutions and capabilities within the virtualized environment. Not only do we provide the hardware and software and services, but we provide training workshops, assessments, design, testing, implementation, replication, back-up, disaster recovery and full-scale migration and support of a virtual infrastructure environment, all on an ongoing basis. Really, DynTek’s mission in this space is to provide unparalleled services and solutions at a reasonable cost so our clients can quickly capitalize on the benefits of virtualization.

JR: Sure. DynTek has an approach to virtualization that really has four objectives to it. The first one is the assessment phase. What we do is work with our customers to determine the business, organizational, financial, technical requirements for a virtual infrastructure to help identify the best possible solutions for the customer. Part of this first phase is we’ll actually create an assessment report, outline the solutions, the recommendations, and the technology based on the identified requirements, not only for the technical requirements, but also to map out the technical requirements as they support the business objectives of our customers. The next phase is the planning phase and this is where our consultants will create a project implementation plan and an architecture blueprint, including the roles, responsibilities, key deadlines and milestones; we identify success criteria, and constraints and contingencies. This really has a lot of success as we build out the chosen infrastructure solution for our customers.

In the third phase, the test phase, we actually build a pilot environment and we test the workload migration, we make sure the tools within VMware; the V-motion, high availability, distributed resource scheduling, disaster recovery and replication, the fail-over and the back ups, all are operational. And we’ll test the management components such as provisioning and maintenance functionality before we actually migrate to the production environment.

Then, the final phase for us is the build phase, where, after the testing, we actually go in and do the implementation where we configure the actual infrastructure according to the blueprint and the plan we identified, we test unit implementation using criteria identified in the plan phase, and, as a result, a working infrastructure built to plan will be delivered with an exception report to note any differences between the plan and the actual implementation as well as configuration notes that we had in there. So by the time we get into the build phase, we’ve tested all these applications and we really ensure a smooth migration from the physical to virtual environment for our customers.

JR: It took us three engineers over the course of three weeks. Those engineers consisted of a network engineer to ensure that we had enough bandwidth to support the deployment of the virtualized infrastructure. We also had another engineer who specializes in the virtual environment and the operating systems. The third consultant specialized in storage. All three of these folks participated jointly with the customer in the install and the migration of the physical to virtual environment.

MD: The IT staff now has the freedom to create virtual services out of the physical IT infrastructure, allowing us to allocate the necessary resources to quickly optimize the infrastructure in real time. This provides us with extensive growth on demand, as the needs change, while delivering the highest levels of performance, scalability and availability to our business. We are now able to allocate less physical space for server needs by consolidating 15 physical servers onto seven blade servers running VM. That helps us standardize back ups, performance issues, and also save us a lot of deadlines for going out, buying a server, getting a stake-hold of the software, configuring everything, testing it, and then putting it in production. This should cut it down from three weeks to approximately a week, we’ve determined. The leverage that we’re using is centralizing everything to one location so we can manage everything – data sharing, back ups, disaster recovery – from one building. This gives us the ability to be more flexible and more productive on other issues. Also, since we moved into VMware and under HP blades, we’re seeing improved performance on the servers and the workstations, making our applications and services a lot quicker and faster. We’re able to improve things much quicker and in a shorter period of time.

MD: Well, Cohoes City School District is now going to look at our technology in town and make sure that it meshes with Cohoes District, and – on the education side – we’re also going to focus more on the Internet access pipe out because we’re seeing that a lot of teachers are now utilizing the Internet to enhance their tools for teaching the students. There are also a lot of business applications on the Internet that we need to report on for the State, so we’re going to focus on that, as well as enhancing and leveraging our content filtering for HIPAA compliance. Content filtering also will help with meeting the educators’ needs, allowing the appropriate sites to be more efficient for students working on the projects that educators have placed in the instruction site.

JR: Our listeners can certainly visit our Web site, www.dyntek.com, where they’ll find a full listing of our services and capabilities and product offerings.

Related Links:

Dyntek.com , Dyntek Cohoes Success Story , Cohoes City School District