Technology in Schools: Building a Feature Rich Modern Web Presence (Part 4)

Servers and Hardware: Options to Make the Most of What You Have

Many school districts are feeling the waves of the current economic situation. Adding on line applications may sometimes be restrained by the lack of money to purchase the computer hardware, physical space for servers, or the need for re-wiring within server room. Let's look at some options that are becoming more main stream and available in the market place that can give more flexibility in situations like these.

Virtualization

What is virtualization? Basically, virtualization utilizes the hardware of one physical computer to provide the appearance, services and capabilities of multiple computers, each of which is capable of running specific services, functions or applications. There are 3 popular approaches to virtualization:

Virtual Machine model
Paravirtual Machine model
Virtualization of the operating system layer

It's in essence, multiple "computers" running on one physical box. Many power-users today use this technology to run applications that are made for other operating systems, giving the user the ability to run a completely different operating system within a window as you would any other application.

For example: I am a Windows and a Mac user. I would like to use my Mac as my primary computer, so I could install virtualization software on my computer, allowing me to open up Windows as I would any other Mac program. This allows me to run Windows software on my Mac that might only be available for Windows.

This same technology can be applied to server operating systems and applications. I could have a Windows bases server (for example) and run several servers as virtual machines on one physical server computer. This also allows to run specialized software that may need a particular operating system installed. My Windows based server could be the host to multiple instances of Mac OS X, Linux, Unix or even other Windows servers. Where you may have previously needed several physical computers to host your many applications, using this technology, you would be able to condense the applications into fewer physical computers.

Virtualization Benefits

What are some benefits of choosing the virtualization path? Here area few that you can consider:

Reduce overall costs:
- reduce the number of physical servers
- reduce electricity use
- reduce maintenance and IT costs
- reduce space used in your data center
- reduce network and electrical wiring requirements
Multiple operating systems on 1 computer
Faster disaster recovery time and portability: A virtual server can be backed up, copied and moved in a faster time period than a traditional server model. If the physical server fails, the virtual machines can be easily copied from a backup onto a new server host and launched quickly, reducing overall downtime.
If you have each application running within its own virtual server, you can prevent operating system or application upgrades from impacting other applications that run on the same physical server.
Speed up server deployment with standard virtual server builds

More Information on Virtualization

3rd Party Application Hosting

(website, email, other services on 3rd party hosts)

Another option would be to have your services hosted by an external host. Several companies offer web, email and other hosted services for K-12. Many schools are host web, email, instant messaging and other applications with hosts such as Google, Gaggle or through regional or state educational technology consortium. This can free up some of your internal IT resources so that efforts can be focused on core applications and development.