Largest Northeast Texas School District Transforms IT with EMC and VCE

HOPKINTON, Mass., March 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --  EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that Tyler Independent School District (Tyler ISD), the largest school district in Northeast Texas, selected EMC^® and VCE solutions to transform how it builds, operates and delivers IT services to meet the next-generation educational needs of its more than 20,000 students and staff across 27 schools. Using a VCE Vblock^® Infrastructure Platform – comprising EMC VNX™ unified storage, Cisco UCS blade servers and VMware vSphere and VMware View –  Tyler ISD has completely transformed its entire IT infrastructure, operations and people to maximize the value of technology inside and outside the classroom.

Customer Benefits:

• Rapid Return on Investment — Tyler ISD will realize cost savings of $1.3 million in the first year, and $3 million over five years compared with its old IT model.
• Improved Responsiveness — Tyler ISD's IT staff can deploy new IT services in minutes based on the dynamic needs of the district.
• Increased Efficiency — Tyler ISD has dramatically streamlined IT administration activities, allowing IT staff to spend more time training teachers and students on how to maximize the value of technology inside and outside the classroom.
• Enhanced IT Value — IT staff is evolving from technicians focused on troubleshooting to strategic IT specialists who are closely aligned with the education process.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
Looking to expand students' ability to learn beyond a seven-hour school day, five days a week, Tyler ISD's school environment needed to transform its IT infrastructure and become a 24x7 operation with opportunities for learning across numerous media and devices for improving students' ability to learn anytime and anywhere. 

To address the need for change, Tyler ISD engaged VCE and EMC Velocity Partner Presidio to transform its IT environment to a highly virtualized, next-generation data center to provide its students with state of the art technology services to help foster learning.  As part of its transformation, Tyler ISD has redefined the role of technology in the classroom, refocusing staff from being technicians focused on maintenance and troubleshooting to becoming IT specialists with a vested stake in the education process.

Customer Quotes:
John Orbaugh, Director of Technology, Tyler Independent School District
"The school environment today is rapidly becoming a 24x7 operation. We transformed our IT environment allowing us to focus on making technology more accessible and flexible so that when students are ready to learn, explore and grow, the tools and information are there—whether they're in the classroom or at home."

"Our virtualized IT infrastructure has freed our staff from spending the majority of their time performing maintenance and troubleshooting tasks and enabled them to shift their focus on more strategic initiatives. As an example, it used to take 200 hours annually to update all of the PCs in the district. Now, we're able to change one image and reboot all of our virtual desktops automatically – freeing up time to help faculty and staff better  to access and leverage technology services in a more natural, meaningfully and easy way."

"We firmly believe that accessing and using IT services should be as easy as breathing. Having a new IT model that drives automation allows us to dedicate more resources to develop new applications and services such as using smart phones and other mobile devices to streamline some of the more mundane tasks for teachers, including taking attendance, which allows them to focus on educating the students instead of administrative tasks."

"Since adopting this virtual infrastructure, our jobs in IT have become a lot more dynamic and exciting. We're more than just technologists now.  Our projects are now focused on affecting the lives of students for the rest of their lives, rather than just simply swapping out a hard drive for example."

"We compared the cost of doing things the old way, before we transformed our IT infrastructure, which would involve replacing our physical computers every few years, instead delivering virtual desktops from our existing hardware. The ROI analysis showed that we will save an astonishing $1.3 million in just one year and more than $3 million over five years."

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about EMC VNX unified storage
• Customer Profile: Read more about Tyler ISD's VNX storage
• Video: Hear more from Tyler ISD
• Learn more about Vblock Infrastructure Platforms
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN  

About EMC
EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, Vblock and VNX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation