Texas School District Turned to Pure Storage and Unidesk

Waxahachie Independent School District (ISD) in Texas serves approximately 8,000 students who rank among the top of their peers in academics, athletics and fine arts.

The school district operates twelve campuses, including seven elementary schools, two junior high schools, and three high schools.

When its first attempt at VDI didn’t meet faculty, staff, and student expectations for performance or the IT team’s expectations for simpler desktop management, the district turned to Pure Storage, Inc. and Unidesk Corporation. An all-flash storage array from Pure Storage and all-in-one VDI management software from Unidesk have changed the perception of desktop virtualization at Waxahachie ISD.

“We had a rough go of it in our first few years with virtual desktops,” said Robert Keith, director of technology, Waxahachie ISD. “Our mechanical disk SAN was unable to provide the necessary performance to deliver consistent uptime, while our diverse lab requirements made it difficult for our small IT team to keep pace with application change requests and desktop updates. With Pure Storage and Unidesk added to our VMware Horizon View deployment, we’re now seeing the improved end user experience, flexibility, standardization, and management simplicity that we had hoped VDI could provide.“

Over the past nine months, Waxahachie ISD’s initial 900-desktop deployment has been re-implemented using Pure Storage and Unidesk. The school is now achieving its BYOD objectives, improving administrative efficiency, and building a foundation that can support new educational standards and computer-based testing. Pure Storage and Unidesk have made VDI so successful that the school is planning to add another 600-700 virtual desktops to serve additional labs, the business office, desk clerks, and non-instructional positions.

Unidesk serves as Waxahachie ISD’s desktop provisioning, image management, and application virtualization solution. Keith says Unidesk layering technology has eliminated the cost and complexity previously associated with creating desktops, patching Windows and updating applications.

“There was so much that could go wrong with virtual desktop rebuilds before that we had to stop doing them mid-week, which delayed how fast we could get applications and patches to our instructors,” said Keith. “Now with Unidesk, we can rebuild desktops anytime and push out the applications our teachers need on a moment’s notice. Unidesk has saved our tail a number of times when teachers called needing software at the last minute.“

Unidesk desktop layering technology provides the same modular application packaging and delivery benefits as traditional application virtualization technology, but without the isolation side effects or lengthy packaging times. Office, Adobe PDF Editor, Audacity, Movie Maker, Doceri, ActivInspire, Skyward, Java SDK, Firefox, Google Chrome, drivers and plug-ins are some of the applications that are being delivered by the school as Unidesk layers. Desktops are created for different labs and users simply by selecting different application layers to go with a single, shared OS layer of Windows 7.

Keith added: “We used to rely on a third party consultant to assist us with image management and application delivery. With Unidesk, we’ve been able to eliminate that cost and take on all desktop management tasks with our own systems engineer. That’s a huge benefit, especially as we scale.“

VMware Horizon View provides secure access to the Unidesk-provisioned virtual desktops through the many client devices in use at the school district, including Dell Wyse and LG thin clients, PCs, Android tablets, and Apple iPads.

A Pure Storage FlashArray hosts the school district’s virtual desktops. With Pure Storage, Waxahachie ISD is experiencing 11:1 data de-duplication, latency of less than one millisecond, and virtual desktop uptime of 99% – all improvements over its legacy SAN array. Unidesk layering technology minimizes how many times the Windows OS and applications are stored, which complements the data de-duplication features in the storage array to further reduce storage capacity requirements. With the combined storage efficiency, Waxahachie ISD expects its current array to support the desktop expansion.

Keith added: “One of the primary reasons that the school district chose VDI was the ability to manage many desktops with a small IT staff. Our first attempt didn’t hit the mark. But Pure Storage and Unidesk really fix VDI. We’ll tell anyone that so that they get the benefit – there’s just too much good about desktop virtualization not to do it. You just need to pick the right technologies.“