The GEO Foundation, an organization setting precedence in public education, announces that it has been selected by Storage Networking World (SNW) as a winner for its Spring 2010 “Best Practices” Awards Program. GEO Foundation was named winner in the Technology Innovation and Promise category for its excellence in virtualization and storage IT solutions.
“We are honored to be chosen as a category winner from SNW,” said Brian Beck, IT Director, GEO Foundation. "Through our research, we were lucky to have found Scale Computing and Citrix Solutions – they made our decision easy and helped us both exceed our IT goals and make implementation a very simple process.”
Through its deployment of storage solutions from Scale Computing and Citrix Systems for its virtualization needs, GEO Foundation was able to solve the issues the organization was facing with data growth and system upgrades. Scale Computing provides highly scalable, modular and migrationless storage systems based on their Intelligent Clustered Storage™ (ICS) technology. Deployed on a commodity hardware platform, Scale storage clusters grow seamlessly from as little as 3 terabytes
(TB) to more than 2.2 petabytes (PB), in increments as small as 1 TB at a time. This technology provided GEO with the storage it needed, at an entry-point price that was nearly 50 percent cheaper than the alternative solutions the organization had researched.
“We love it when our clients see superior performance coupled with cost savings by using our storage technology – it’s what drives our business,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and founder, Scale Computing. “We are excited for GEO Foundation and thrilled to see that they are being recognized for their innovative approach to solving their IT issues. They are very deserving of the recognition.”
Citrix solutions, including Citrix XenServer®, became the choice for GEO’s virtualization needs with its family of products and services that could be easily integrated into GEO’s existing environment. Citrix XenServer is the only enterprise-class, cloud-proven server virtualization platform that delivers the critical features of live migration and centralized multi-server management at no cost. XenServer is an open and powerful server virtualization solution that radically reduces datacenter costs by transforming static and complex datacenter environments into more dynamic, easy to manage IT service delivery centers.
By combining storage solutions from Scale and virtualization products from Citrix, the GEO Foundation immediately saw tangible results and cost-savings. In a little over one month, GEO was able to transition all of their storage onto Scale solutions, virtualize six existing servers and even retire five other servers – all at just one of GEOs charter schools. They have also been able to condense their data to a single backup repository on Scale storage. Overall, they have retired and/or repurposed 14 servers - resulting in more than $60,000 in savings in just one month.