Scale Computing, a developer and manufacturer of intelligent, scale-out storage solutions, and GEO Foundation today announced that its Intelligent Clustered Operating System™ (ICOS) project has been awarded Storage Virtualisation Project of the Year at the DCS Awards ceremony, which took place on 19 May at the QEII Conference Centre in London.
The Storage Virtualisation Project of the Year award recognises the implementation of a project centred on storage virtualisation technology and the impact it has made on the customer. The category identifies the innovative aspects of the project and the tangible benefits the organisation has seen as a result of the project’s implementation.
Commenting on the award, Jeff Ready, co-founder and CEO, said: “We are very pleased to be recognised for this award as it demonstrates the positive impact our solution has had on our customer and further drives awareness of intelligent, unified, scale-out storage solutions for virtualisation. It supports our global growth success and shows our increasing customer base, in particular those that want to add both capacity and performance in a unified environment – something that stands us above our competitors.”
Scale Computing was chosen as a trusted provider for The Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation (GEO Foundation) to supply flexible storage solutions and deliver a virtual desktop to every student. The GEO Foundation is based in Indianapolis, Indiana and sponsors four charter schools serving over 1,200 students across Indiana and Colorado. The growing student base across the primary and secondary schools was straining its current computing infrastructure and the GEO was faced with supporting multiple schools and server farms, growing storage needs with expensive cooling requirements, and the glaring issue of desktop backups becoming more difficult and expensive every year.
By combining storage solutions from Scale and virtualisation products from Citrix, the GEO was able to not only find a solution that could handle their growing needs without migrating data or disrupting education services, but also enabled them to deploy desktop virtualisation which would make more efficient use of server resources, assist disaster recovery and centralise server administration.
Brian Beck, CIO, GEO Foundation says, “We were extremely excited to come across Scale Computing, as its solutions were exactly what we were looking for, at a price point well below what we had expected. Scale’s entry price is comparable to the most basic systems, yet its ability to grow over time exceeds that of even the most complex solutions, which is something we looked for as we expand. Of our budgeted $20,000 per school, we only spent $15,000 for each of the three school sites, leaving close to $15,000 to be allocated into other projects that benefit the students. Add to that the amount we saved in the overall virtualization project by virtualizing or repurposing 14 servers, and our total cost savings is close to $85,000.”
These savings benefitted the students, as the GEO Foundation is now able to service its students on a 2:1 computer-to-student ratio, whereas they had previously only had budget for a 4:1 computer-to-student ratio.