School District Virtualizes Aging Servers, Saves $200,000

Based in Louisville, Jefferson County Public Schools is the largest school district in the state of Kentucky. Operating in an economic downturn, the district felt pressure to reduce costs without affecting classroom learning. The IT department responded by looking for a solution to contain server sprawl, standardize a disparate server infrastructure across more than 150 schools, and centralize IT management. To achieve these goals, it deployed the Windows Server 2008 Datacenter operating system and the Hyper-V virtualization technology. To date, it has reduced physical servers by 10 percent in remote locations and 30 percent in the data center. The IT staff is using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to administer the district's centralized IT server infrastructure more efficiently.