INDUSTRY
Education (K-12)
BUSINESS NEEDS
BUSD needed help troubleshooting, simplifying and maintaining its infrastructure which runs Horizon View, video surveillance, and virtual server workloads. Fixing issues was timeconsuming and there was an inefficient use of already over-extended IT staff. IT leadership wanted their staff to focus on more strategic and end-user projects rather than on solving recurring problems.
SOLUTION
- Nutanix Resident Consultant Services
- Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform
- Nutanix Prism Management Solution
- VMware Horizon View Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
- AppSense Desktop Now
BENEFITS
- Stabilized VDI environment delivering a consistent end-user experience
- Increased end-user productivity through improved system availability
- Automated manual operational tasks, reducing effort from hours to minutes
- Freed up internal IT staff from troubleshooting repetitive issues
- Obtained seamless support from Nutanix Consulting Services
BACKGROUND
Deana Sabala is the Director of Information Technology for Bellflower Unified School District. She manages the IT team and sets the direction for technology infrastructure and delivery for the district. “We have a relatively small technology department,” Sabala said. “We were lacking the expertise to fully utilize the software and hardware in our environment. We have an increasingly complex IT infrastructure that supports 700 teachers and administrators and over 13,000 students. Our goal was to implement an efficient, yet easily manageable and scalable infrastructure.”
CHALLENGE
The Bellflower Unified School District had previously relied on traditional 3-tier infrastructure, which had become overly complex to manage and scale. They had recently transitioned to a hosted desktop environment, utilizing VMware Horizon View Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Another managed service provider designed and built their VDI environment, but during their first year of using the solution, they experienced many issues as described below by Ms. Sabala.
“The desktops would not be accessible at random times, our devices did not work with our VM environment, and many of our critical applications were not working as intended. The system was unreliable and we experienced downtime each month due to misconfigurations made in the system.”
Users would often get locked out of their systems and the IT team had to delete and rebuild the VM, a process that took hours because their personalization was not configured correctly. Ultimately, BUSD realized that they lacked the specific skills and expertise to troubleshoot and resolve misconfigurations and promote the reliability and efficiency of their infrastructure.
SOLUTION
From Firefighting to Fail-Safe Resiliency
BUSD found an experienced partner in Nutanix Services; one who possesses a clear understanding of their existing software and hardware environment and who knows best how to achieve their goals. They enlisted the help of Nutanix Resident Consultant Services for the deployment and ongoing management of the VDI environment. “We chose Nutanix Resident Consultant Services because they were able to demonstrate a clear understanding of our goals and what our targets were,” Sabala explained.
Nutanix resolved the misconfigurations associated with the personalization settings as well as aligned the solution to best practices. With the environment optimized, end users no longer experienced consistent downtime events, which saved system administrators and IT support staff 200-250 hours per month on reprovisioning, troubleshooting, and testing desktops.
The Nutanix Resident Consultant provides a full-time engineer who is unbiased and knowledgeable across the entire solution stack, not only the Nutanix aspects of the solution. In this case, the Resident Consultant is a subject matter expert in VMWare’s Horizon View for VDI, AppSense Desktop Now for User Profile Management, scripting tasks to automate operational procedures, and Nutanix. The Resident Consultants leverage the expertise of Nutanix’s global network and ensure that the solution aligns with the best practices for hosting these workloads on Nutanix.
“Our Nutanix Consultant was able to make the environment ‘nearly invisible’,” Sabala said. “They handle all of our migrations, database upgrades, security patching, and updates to our virtual environment, freeing our IT staff to concentrate on deploying new applications and providing the best end user experience. They have also automated many of our tasks, further reducing our IT management burden.”
Our Nutanix Resident Consultant really makes the infrastructure invisible. He handles all of our installations, maintenance upgrades, and expansions— freeing our IT staff to concentrate on deploying new apps and providing the best end-user experience.
Deana Sabala, Director of Information Technology, Bellflower Unified School District
RESULTS
From Complicated to Simple
By selecting the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform and Prism Management Solution, BUSD was able to simplify their IT management significantly. By using Nutanix Resident Consultant Services, BUSD now has a stable virtualized environment with a consistent end user experience. “Having a dedicated Nutanix expert on hand has provided us with peace of mind, and is enabling us to implement new services and technologies without hesitation,” Sabala reported. “Nutanix’s ability to quickly jump in and assist our team has saved our staff a lot of time and headaches.”
With the deep expertise of the Nutanix Services consultants and the simplicity of the Nutanix platform, BUSD has obtained a stable, easy-to-use, and simpleto- manage infrastructure solution. “With all of the time we are saving on infrastructure management, our IT team is finally able to work on new projects with complete confidence,” Sabala concluded.