INDIANAPOLIS - June 10, 2020 - Scale Computing, the market leader in edge computing, virtualization and hyperconverged solutions, today announced that the New Albany-Floyd County Consolidated School District was able to quickly and securely have all of their administrative staff working from home with remote desktop access on their existing IT infrastructure from Scale Computing in just a few days following a one-hour deployment.
The New Albany-Floyd County Consolidated School Corporation is a public school district and has operated as a separate governmental unit since 1956. Located in Floyd County, Indiana, the district’s enrollment totals approximately 12,000 students in pre-kindergarten through high school programs and employs more than 1200 full-time personnel. When the school district needed to support immediate work-from-home solutions in response to COVID-19, they turned to Scale Computing.
“Before this situation started we were not a work-from-home organization. Most administrative staff needed to be in the office to access critical applications. When the orders came down to close the schools, our team was tasked with finding a solution,” said Chris Bowers, IT Manager at The New Albany-Floyd County Consolidated School Corporation. “Scale Computing provided the configuration, architecture and virtual machines free of charge, and offered the trial VDI licenses for free for a month during the crisis. We were so grateful our IT infrastructure partner stepped up to help during this time of need.”
At the end of 2019, Bowers and IT leadership decided it was time to migrate from their existing, legacy IT infrastructure. The school district wanted improved management and efficiency, as well as an extra level of redundancy. When the new reality of the COVID-19 pandemic and workforces being mandated to work from home settled in, Bowers and team were already about 90% of the way finished with their migration to the Scale Computing Platform.
“When the work-from-home order was delivered the administrative offices needed connectivity and access, but many of the staff did not have a computer at home. Purchasing laptops was not going to happen in such a short time frame, and we did not want the security risk of opening up VPN connectivity to devices we do not manage,” Bowers shared.
“Luckily, we did have Chromebooks on hand, and we issued those to people who needed them, but critical applications were a mix of web-based and internally-hosted applications. Scale Computing had emailed their customers with details for a fast solution, and it met our needs. The message claimed deployment would be in an hour or less, and honestly, we didn’t really believe it. But it was true - we timed it and we were able to finish deployment in just under an hour. We had the school staff up and running, working from home, and we haven’t received a single support call since. It all just works.”
Leveraging virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology, Scale Computing packaged two virtual machine images customers could download for free, put together a how-to video, and trained technical support staff to assist them in deploying the remote work technology solution. The VDI Connection Broker, Gateway, and Agent provide easy, intuitive configuration and management for the SC//Platform environment, whether using remote access, only on-premises access, or a combination of both. No additional devices or services are needed to get organizations up and running quickly.
“We are proud we could create a secure, innovative and easy solution to support our customers when they needed us,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and Co-founder of Scale Computing. “This short-term remote solution prepares customers for future IT transformation with a true VDI deployment. Scale Computing virtualization and VDI solutions provide a simple solution with rapid deployment, ease of management, and high availability.”
About Scale Computing
Scale Computing is a leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions. Scale Computing Platform eliminates the need for traditional virtualization software, disaster recovery software, servers, and shared storage, replacing these with a fully integrated, highly available system for running applications. Using patented HyperCore™ technology, the self-healing platform automatically identifies, mitigates, and corrects infrastructure problems in real time, enabling applications to achieve maximum uptime. When ease-of-use, high availability, and TCO matter, SC//Platform is the ideal infrastructure platform. Read what our customers have to say on Gartner Peer Insights, Spiceworks, TechValidate and TrustRadius.