So much for home field advantage.
The Alvarado Independent School District in Alvarado, Texas, has dumped Dell Compellent storage technology in favor of EMC’s VNX and VMware technology to deliver VDI to the students. What forced the district to abandon its Lone Star State brethren, and does this portend more to come? Here’s the scoop …
In the news release announcing the EMC install, the Alvarado School District sings the praises of EMC’s technology benefits including the district’s improved data center footprint, smaller TCO and quicker ROI, as well as the Holy Grail of K-12 education: happier students. With EMC VNX, Alvarado’s schools have become learning centers of the future, offering students the ability to use whatever connected devices they want, as long as they’re compatible with the VMware VDI infrastructure.
Alvarado noted Dell Compellent storage infrastructure wasn’t able to keep up with the school’s quickly growing needs, causing bottlenecks when large numbers of students all booted to the same VDI cloud. With the EMC FAST Cache and VMware backbone, Alvarado School no longer has these issues. And because of the switch from Dell to EMC, the district projects spending less on student computers in the future, thanks to the more evergreen nature of centralized VDI. Efficiency is also up, apparently due to EMC’s Unisphere management tool that helps the school IT admins quickly deal with the virtualized infrastructure and physical machines.
This is a clear case of EMC going after Dell Compellent customers. Adding insult to injury is the location of the win — Texas happens to be Dell’s home base.
But let’s wrap some perspective around this announcement: Dell’s latest earnings showed its storage business (and large enterprise) is actually doing well. Plus, at the Dell Storage Forum 2011 in Orlando, happy partners were enthusiastic about Dell’s ongoing commitment to unifying and creating a “fluid” line of storage solutions for both Compellent and EqualLogic partners to work in. So here’s a hunch: Perhaps the Alvarado School District waited too long to upgrade and EMC swooped in before a Dell partner could.
Bottom line for the channel? Storage and virtualization is hot. Don’t underestimate the opportunities.
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Yeah, that makes sense. Seems fishy to me. In a state poised to layoff teachers, a small school district in Texas can suddenly afford to buy a VNX server from EMC.
I don’t think its that surprising, EMC’s VNX family of storage platforms start with the VNXe at below $10k through the channel.
John@1: Money may be tight but schools still have to spend on IT…
James@2: The VAR Guy concedes that he’s not familiar with VNX pricing. Regardless of the price tag it was interesting to see EMC win this deal in Dell’s back yard…
-TVG
Wait till it’s time time to renew their maintenance contract in 3 years. Tax payers will be wishing they were privy to the TCO discussion.
The operating budget is approx. 40 Million dollars, and approx. 3300 students are enrolled in the district; so simple division tells us that around 12K is spent per student per year. Money doesn’t seem to be too tight.
James: VNX and VNXe are two different things-especially in pricing. Nothing in the above article mentions VNXe anyway.
Dean: Where are you getting this $40M operating budget?
Anyway, cheers to EMC for pushing Dell off of another customer.
From the Alvarado ISD Website.
Rhett, Dean, Brian: The VAR Guy doesn’t have a good feel for the school’s IT budget or this project’s ROI. But our resident blogger does appreciate your decision to swing by and share perspectives. -TVG
http://thebizofk12.com/?p=48#comment-403
I think this parleys off of this same blog and is sharing his experience around what happened. I caught wind (purely hearsay but news travels fast in Dallas) of a visit from a regional VP strong arming the ISD to remove the published collateral. Curious to know if that really happened. If so, that is a great customer retention policy.
http://thebizofk12.com/?p=48#comment-403
I think this parleys off of this same blog and is sharing his experience around what happened. I caught wind (purely hearsay but news travels fast in Dallas) of a visit from a regional VP strong arming the ISD to remove the published collateral. Curious to know if that really happened. If so, that is a great customer retention policy.
http://thebizofk12.com