Green Data Cabinets Feature Editorial

Citrix Systems (News - Alert) recently announced that Montgomery Independent School District or “ISD,” situated north of Houston, Texas, has executed a multi-phased program to bring to date and virtualize their academic computing systems utilizing Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenServer.

The first step of Montgomery ISD’s implementation used XenServer to virtualize and merge their servers in a core data center. In the second phase, it extended the installation to procure district-wide standardization for desktop virtualization with XenDesktop.

The school district has already achieved substantial cost savings in time, energy, money and employee expenditures, and hopes to extend these savings further in the future.

Previously, the IT personnel available to cater to over 6,500 students across Montgomery ISD’s eight schools was insufficient and on-site service visits took up hours of time each week.

Now, XenDesktop helps the district’s IT team to build a single illustration of the OS and applications within the data center and provides customized desktops to classrooms on any PC, laptop or thin client device.

Using the desktop and server virtualization solutions from Citrix, Montgomery ISD has built an “academic computing virtualization” ecosystem. This delivers a thorough computing experience to Montgomery ISD students and makes educational technology more widely accessible. This results in significant cost benefits for the school district.

Also, HDX technology provides a high-definition experience every time a student logs in, irrespective of location or desktop virtualization technology used.

Montgomery ISD began to achieve major energy savings immediately post their virtualization implementations. XenDesktop will save Montgomery ISD around $24,000 in energy expenses this year. This is in line with the statewide goal to cut down on operational costs by 30 percent over five years.