School District in Pittsburgh

United States

“The QSAN units deliver extraordinary performance and capacity, enabling us to meet the district’s present and future needs. Moreover, we maximized our school budget by purchasing all four devices for less than what a single unit from a major vendor would cost."

Director of Technology

Company Biography

Based in PA and spanning a handful of rural communities in the middle of the state, this School District takes pride in its progressive education. Comprised of a high school, middle school, and three elementary schools, the district integrates technologies into daily instruction. K–6 students each have an Apple iPad Mini and older students have MacBook Air laptops. Instruction is personalized and classrooms are creative learning spaces for group and project learning.

School District in Pittsburgh - QSAN Success Story

The Challenge

The District uses Jamf, the Apple mobile device management solution to administer the 1,800 computers and iPads used by its 1500 students and 200 faculty and staff. Jamf, however, generates a significant amount of log data daily that also strained the District’s storage. Moreover, the District must store business, financial, and student management information, including a database-driven business application developed for some PA school districts.

“This business app has a large client that our legacy storage couldn’t load quickly for users,” said by the Director of Technology,“We also want to bring our student information system inhouse from a cloud, and we plan to roll out virtual desktops, both of which would tax our existing systems even further.

”Finally, the District required strong backup and replication for data protection. It was paying $1000/mo. for backup services, anongoing expense it wanted to eliminate. “Our legacy devices lacked the performance to meet our current needs. To ensure our educational standards, we wanted very fast, affordable solutions, ideally from one vendor to ensure we always had a single point of contact for service.

The Solution

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The District benefits from the ultra-fast XF2026D AFA with its installed Seagate Nytro flash drives.

“We effortlessly store Jamf logs and data from all of our devices. We can quickly push out apps like our inhouse student information app, virtual desktops, and our business system. Users are delighted that they no longer have to wait for clients to load or for reports to be generated.” Also thanks to XS3212D SAN arrays, the District has strong data protection. One, located across a street from the District’s high-school data center, backs up production data, eliminating monthly service costs. The second, located off-site, stores replicated data for disaster protection.

We were confident that the QSAN systems would provide highspeed performance and capacity, but we were pleasantly surprised by how affordable they are.

The Benefits

Performance and affordability