Ever considered how difficult it is for any school to decide on the best, most efficient, best performing and easiest to manage networking infrastructure? Well, having been there a while ago myself, when I was managing a school network, I certainly feel for them, as the lack of networking experts in most schools makes this a very difficult task. However, Intel Modular Server combined with virtualisation technology may just be the solution! Installation and management couldn’t be any easier and the possible savings in power, footprint, airconditioning make this product an ideal contender for any school thinking of upgrading their existing infrastructure or indeed having a new network put in. And this is not even talking about any performance gains! Yet!

The recent success of Intel Modular Server in Broadgreen Intenational Highschool Liverpool most certainly confirms that. The schools IT supporting 3^rd party vendor was very hesitant to go down this route, having the idea that virtualisation would not be a good thing in such an environment (too difficult, too unreliable, too costly and a few other “top of head” arguments!). Once they saw the benefits in action though the tune changed completely: “The solution will be amazing once its up and running.” 

Now the school have condensed their original setup of 4 admin servers, print servers, mail servers, storage boxes etc etc into one Intel Modular Server chassis containing only 2 compute modules populated with Xeon® 55xx CPUs (hence still having huge opportunity for further expansion) and ample storage. And they are delighted! And astonished how easy and quick it was to migrate their existing systems over and how easy it is to manage the new server!

So, there is a simple, cost effective, easy to manage and very powerful solution after all for schools and other educational establishments -> let’s just call it “The school in a box!”