SKT/West VDI Case Study - Derby Schools

Derby Public Schools makes education modern and mobile with desktop virtualization

 Derby Public Schools, in Derby, Kansas, a city of 25,000 people, has over
6,000 students, 1,400 employees, and a daily average of 7,000 users on
desktops, laptops, PCs, and Macs in four support buildings, and nine
elementary and three secondary schools.
Derby had an outdated, expensive, and inefficient infrastructure of different
kinds of old and new desktops, many underutilized physical servers, and
applications loaded onto the hard drives of desktops located in many different
buildings. It was difficult for Derby Schools’ small IT department to meet
curriculum goals for technology and education, and maintain the complex
distributed computing environment in good times. The situation became
even more daunting when the economy slowed and state education funding
was scaled back.

The challenge – Deliver leading edge learning tools despite budget cuts
Drew Lane, Derby Schools’ director of IT, faced conflicting demands. Lane
wanted to improve the system to give students access to the latest learning
tools and cut costs. He investigated ways to improve server efficiency, and stop
buying new, high-powered PCs that often ended up vastly underutilized. Lane
came across an article on desktop virtualization and quickly realized that the
solution showed great promise for resolving the school district’s challenges.

Implementing a virtualized IT environment from Citrix
Derby Schools is now implementing a completely virtualized environment
for its servers, desktops, and applications with Citrix® XenDesktop™, Citrix®
XenApp™, Citrix® NetScaler®, Citrix® XenServer™, Citrix Receiver™, and
Citrix® Access Gateway™. “We did a few select desktops at a time and one
day they would log in and they would see the applications, the next day they
would log in and the only difference they could see was that the background
color had changed,” said Lane. “We did that so we would know which systems
were virtualized and which systems weren’t.” They looked and acted that
much alike. By the beginning of the school year 2012, Derby Schools’ IT
environment will be completely virtualized except for a few locations and
applications that require a local host to function.
Savings in desktop refresh of more than 50 percent
The desktop PC refresh benefits were immediately evident. Instead of buying
new desktops for the district every four years, virtualization extends the life
of existing PCs, replacing them only as they fail with inexpensive mobile
devices. “We can get the laptops and Netbooks that we know students are
going to want to use for less money than what we were spending on
desktops and apps,” said Lane.

School is now wherever the student is
While saving on desktop refresh costs was the driving force to implementing a
virtualized IT services delivery model, Derby Schools found that it also helped
expand education outside the classroom. Students no longer have to come into
the school to access applications. Now, their lessons can come to them.
Students can access the school desktop and applications from anywhere—at
anytime—all that’s needed is a computer and an Internet connection. “On a
regular basis, we have students who are homebound for one reason or another,”
said Lane. “They don’t have to be completely out of the loop. If they have a
computer at home that has any sort of Internet connection, we can provide
them applications using our Citrix environment and the student doesn’t have
to miss school.”

Adapting education to student lifestyle
Derby Schools’ virtualized system also lets students use devices that they like
to use, which makes education more student friendly. “You give the students
the device they want to use and the mobility that they like to have,” said Lane,
“and they are more interested in what’s going on. They look at the computer
as their communication device, their entertainment device, as well as a
device they can do school work on. We think it’s going to be an overall
positive for our district.”
Added flexibility
Desktop virtualization made Derby Schools much more flexible. Its virtualized
infrastructure easily manages a mix of Windows® and Mac® computers. Some
of the teachers have Mac laptops with Citrix® Dazzle™ installed. “To them,”
Lane said, “it looks like absolutely native access to those applications,” yet
the applications are virtualized in the datacenter and delivered to the laptop
via Citrix Receiver and Dazzle.

Into the future
“We had a distributed computing environment and what I’m trying to work
toward is a receiver-based computing environment,” said Lane. “I want
students to think of their computer for education the same way they think of
their cable box or their DIRECTV receiver for entertainment. As long as you
have one, you can get the programming.
“We’re trying to get a system where we only worry about infrastructure and
connectivity. If somebody comes to us and says, ‘I want this application.’
Whatever device you have, if we can install Citrix Receiver on it, you’re good
to go. We are making platforms irrelevant and Citrix is helping us do that.”

A .pdf of this case study can be found here