There is no box

thinking out loud about technology, education and life

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K-12 Superintendent, reformed IT guy, educator, 1:1 evangelist, life long learner, father, husband, geek, ex self-propelled field artillery turret mechanic, GCT, CCTO, INFP

  • The Power Of Data

    Working in a modern day manufacturing facility, data was all around me. As the IT Manager at Quebecor World’s Merced Plant, my team was responsible for the plant dash board. A web based application that collected and showed the plant’s production performance in real time, pulling in data from hundreds of sensors throughout the production process. It was quite amazing to see. We were constantly making the UI easier to read and more powerful for users. The ability to drill down and adjust production on the fly was incredible. Reviewing historical performance and being able to adjust and re-adjust processes for improved performance and see the results in real time was invaluable. It saved the Plant hundreds of thousands of dollars annually and paid for itself many times over. That system of data collection and display helped make that plant one o the most innovative printing facilities in the world.

    We have data in education too. It’s not real time and it hardly ever gets used to impact current performance, but we do have it. Since coming over to K12, I’ve often wondered why we don’t have dashboards for data in schools. Real time readouts with learning metrics, attendance stats, facilities conditions in one simple view or every principal to see. And similar dashboards for teachers, with all of a student’s performance data displayed in easy to read graphs and charts. Unfortunately I’ve never had the resources of Programmers in K12 to delve into the concept.

    That’s why I am fascinated by systems like Khan Academy’s Learning Dashboard and BrightByte’s Clarity for Schools. Both represent powerful uses of data and move education closer to the world of learning analytics. It’s becoming possible to get bigger views of whats happening in schools, from student achievement to the impact of technology PD in the classroom. Being able to capture data and present it in a user friendly and useful manner is getting easier every day.

    SBAC promises even more potential with data in the form of the Formative Assessments that should give teachers a (more or less) continuous view into student learning. I’m excited or the potential of data in education and quite frankly I’m surprised the big Student Information System (SIS) vendors haven’t figured this out yet. As a parent, I would love to see a something like a Learning Dashboard for my kid. But then again, a classroom blog would work for me too.

  • Cabinet Or Bust

    Every school district I’ve ever worked with has done two things terribly in my opinion (at least prior to my arrival). The first is plan for technology in a sustainable and strategic way and the second is to provide adequate support for technology use in the classroom. I can attribute both to the lack of a Cabinet level technology leader involved in the day to day decision making discussions of the district.

    It strikes me as profoundly short sighted that in the rush to test every California kid on computers in March 2014, these two fundamental flaws in many school district’s thinking are not being addressed.

    I just met with a school district that realized they needed someone to help them through these interesting times, however they weren’t willing to commit all the way for a cabinet level position reporting to the Superintendent, instead opting for a position reporting between Business and C&I. Having reported to two different departments once before, I can personally say this is a recipe for disaster. But they are trying and that’s an important point. Another district I know of is trying as well and they appear to have gotten it right, posting for a Cabinet Level CTO position reporting to the Superintendent to help guide them through these technologically challenging times. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be much guidance on this from the existing leadership organizations, and that’s really too bad. So here is my take on it.

    In the absence of a CTO to guide them, many school districts are using their one time Common Core money to solve what they think are their readiness troubles (ie. buying devices by the pallet load) but these plans are short sighted. Long after that one time money is gone, online testing and the learning environments needed to prepare kids for 21st century literacy will require a constant refresh of equipment and a level of technical support most schools have never known.

    So why have schools historically never invested in regular technology updates or enough technical support? Well, for starters, technology hasn’t been a fundamental need in schools before now. Sure, certain programs may have required a school computer lab or a classroom mini lab but these have generally always been school driven and funded. And then usually with one time dollars and no plan for hardware obsolescence or replacement. Daily integration of technology into instruction on a district wide scale is completely new for most and to think a district can succeed with common core and online assessments without increased student access to technology is just plain crazy.

    Along the same lines, in many school districts there has never been a concrete relationship between the  number of devices a school purchases and the amount of support the district provides. In my experience, individual schools have been able to add more and more devices and keep older and older systems running while expecting the same level of support from the continuously stretched District IT departments.

    And while there are ways to mitigate some of this through communication between Principals and IT, the use of technology committees and district standards, nothing is more effective than a Cabinet level CTO who can bridge the gap between Business and Instruction and guide the district strategically through what is now a constantly changing technology landscape with profound implications for student learning and assessment.

    The SBAC challenge is a major structural problem facing districts and many are ill prepared to address the scale of technology that it requires. Districts need CTOs now more than ever to inform and guide them through to the other side of SBAC and the future beyond with online and blended learning, virtual schools and learning analytics.

    At a basic level, how a district funds and purchases devices has to change. How support is funded, allocated and structured has to change. How technology is used in the district, in school offices and in classrooms has to change. All of this can’t be done from a second tier seat on the back end of the leadership team.

    And when it comes to technology support for the classroom, building an expectation for daily technology integration which relies on technology to work more often than not requires a support system more like modern business has been using for the past two decades than schools have ever been used to before. Schools have some of the worst device to support staff ratios in the business world. In an environment where technology down time was acceptable or at least tolerated, these high ratios were ok. But moving into environments where down time measured in days will have serious impacts on student learning and the ability to administer online assessments, support ratios are going to have to change. Some districts are already in the process of hiring more tech support staff and creating help desks with live people manning the phones for immediate tech support. Who is driving these changes in districts without CTOs? Is anyone listening?

    In addition to basic technical support, teachers and principals need support integrating technology into their instruction like never before. It’s not just enough to make sure the tech works, the district needs to provide resources to help teachers integrate it into their daily instruction because not knowing about technology is no longer an acceptable answer.

    Let me reiterate that, online adaptive assessments are not a school problem. Districts can’t leave these decisions up to principals the same way they’ve left technology decisions to them in the past. That has led to the situation I see at many Districts, where some principals invest in computers, support and technology for students and others do not; creating an uneven distribution of technology access for students. Districts are going to have to step up and start owning technology from start to finish if reliable online assessment results are important to them. Kids are going to need screen time to be ready for the tests. All kids, not just the ones that go to the school where the PTA fund raises for computer labs.

    A district without a CTO at the table has a good chance of missing the forest for the trees. With a CTO on board; making sure technology is integrated into common core implementation plans and the strategic long term vision of the district, the district will ensure that it isn’t just being reactionary and doesn’t find itself unprepared for the many changes being driven by the rapid advances of technology in the education policy making space.

    It’s important to note that none of this is about the technology. It’s all about providing teachers and students access to the resources that are taken for granted everywhere else in the modern world but in our classrooms. It’s about preparing districts for the 21st Century and Common Core. It’s about building schools and school cultures where students want to learn. It’s about empowering teachers through technology to become better teachers. It’s about preparing kids for their unknown futures and districts for the unknown challenges yet to come.

    Cabinet or bust!

  • Random Thoughts on SBAC Preparedness

    Just a random thought exercise. By no means definitive.

    • Internet Bandwidth – 100Mbps per 10,000 kids. (SBAC Tech Specs)
    • School WAN connections to the District Office – 250Mbps-1Gbps (more is better)
    • Campus Backbones – 1Gbps, 10Gbps if you can (again, more is better)
    • Bandwidth Shaping at the Firewall
    • A Wireless Access Point in every classroom. 4-5 in the Gym/Multi-Purpose Rooms
      • Look for low cost, high value, easy to setup and support, should not require a certification in wifi to manage
    • An online, platform agnostic collaboration suite. Preferably free – I’m partial to Google Apps for Education
    • Devices for teachers – See “In A Perfect EdTech World“
    • Student Devices (Goal should be 1:1)
      • 1:1 Take Home – iPads. Management overhead in a shared cart model is problematic.
      • 1:1 Classroom Cart Model – Ubermix 11.6″ Notebooks  or Chromebooks
      • Shared Classroom Cart Model/Library/Learning Labs – Chromebooks
      • 1:1 Take Home With No Internet – Ubermix 11.6″ Notebooks
      • K-2 Learning Environments and Special Ed – iPads
      • 3-8th SBAC (Cal-MAPP) testing – Chromebooks or Ubermix 11.6″ Notebooks
      • In A Perfect SBAC Free 1:1 World – A tablet or every student with Chromebooks sprinkled throughout the classrooms
    • PD – The Elephant In The Room, as Dr. Vollmert likes to say.
      • Basic Tech Skills
      • Online Collaboration and Creation Skills
      • Content Search and Acquisition Skills
      • Technology Integration Into Daily Instruction Skills
      • EdTech Departments – Need a Cadre of Instructional Support People to help teachers and administrators develop these skills
    • Tech Support – The Hippopotamus In The Room
      • Site Techs – One for every 3-13 sites isn’t going to cut it anymore
        • 1 Per Comprehensive High School
        • 1 Per every two Middle Schools
        • 1 Per every 3-4 Elementary Schools
    • Sustainable Funding
      • No more school by school technology purchases
      • No more “one time money” tech planning
      • Need scheduled refresh cycles – student devices have a three year shelf life
      • LCFF lets districts set priorities, make sure sustainable equitable access to technology is one of them

    What did I miss?

  • What Does A Kid Need To Learn?

    What does a kid need to learn these days? If you believe as I do that access to the Internet is a fundamental requirement for learning and living in the 21st Century, then the next question to ask is what is the best device to achieve that? It’s a question I hear asked often. Everyone seems to want a simple answer. Buy this device, it’s common core ready. Or buy this device, it’s SBAC ready. Or buy this device because it’s the IT department’s standard and it can be “managed” and supported the way we’ve always done it. Well, I suppose there are some factors that need to be considered but my requirements for a 1:1 device for all students are fairly basic. I did agree to hand out iPads to High School students, after all.

    I believe a student’s everyday device should do three things really well. I’m leaning on my everyday device (iPhone) use for guidance here. First, the device’s battery has to last under heavy use through the entire school day. If the device has to be charged in the middle of the day, that presents all kinds of access issues. Ideally, the device would last a day and a half, given that some kids might forget to charge over night. Not that I have ever forgotten to charge my iPhone. Second, a student device has to be cheap and relatively durable. These devices will see a lot of wear and tear. Some will be stolen, some will be broken. It’s possible to wrap devices in protective cases to achieve durability, but it would be nice if they were semi-decent out of box. And last but not least, the device has to perform. It needs decent specs, good speed, a responsive touch screen or trackpad and it has to have wireless 5GHz connectivity because it needs to get kids onto the Internet in high density environments.

    What does cheap mean to me? Well, as someone who works for a public school, it means sub $300 per device. This knocks out quite a few devices right away and leaves us with basically Chromebooks, 11.6″ Notebooks, iPad minis (if we close one eye and squint past $29) and 7″ Android tablets. Of the four, the 7″ Android tablet, specifically the Nexus 7, pretty much beats all the rest on price and handily meets the other two requirements. So why isn’t every school in CA buying these low cost Internet connected devices for students? Well, I think the main reason is because our new next generation 21st Century tests won’t work on a 7″ screen. A light weight, inexpensive device that can access the world’s knowledge yet we can’t give one to every student because the “new” online tests were written for desktops? Desktops are done. It’s Ridiculous.

    Cheap Android Tablets

    But lets pursue the 7″ tablet idea further and pretend that perhaps we still can provide every student a low cost tablet (I really wish google made a $150 wifi only Nexus 4) while living in a utopian world where we might buy carts of Chromebooks for our testing labs to meet the requirements of the folks in Sacramento.

    What might students be able to do on a daily basis with a device that has no physical keyboard and only a 7″ screen? Well quite a lot if my wife’s computing experience over the past year is any indication of how the world has changed. Everything that she used to do on her Laptop she now does on her iPhone, including reading, shopping, bill paying, registering the kids for activities. Everything. Up until I got Printopia setup, the only reason she ever had to use the Laptop anymore was to print. And now that’s no longer an issue. Granted, she’s not writing 5 page essays anymore. But she’s posting on Facebook, communicating daily with her friends and family via iMessage and recording pictures and videos of the kids. She’s creating content as well as accessing it just fine on that dinky 4″ iPhone 5 screen. I think a small, light weight, affordable, portable device is the perfect way to go in education. It would get every kid connected, affordably and immediately. If not for the silly tests and their 10″ screen size and physical keyboard requirements.

    So back to reality, if it weren’t for SBAC, I think I’d be advocating for 1:1 tablets for kids (7″ Androids for cost, unless Apple gets on the ball with the iPad mini pricing next week) with a few Chromebooks in every classroom and a few Chromebook carts in every Library. Google Apps for Education (GAFE) would be the bridge between the devices and students would have access to their content on any device, anywhere and anytime. But SBAC is here and providing an equitable testing solution for all students is going to be a real challenge for many schools. The hodge podge of devices currently found in my district’s schools provide neither ubiquitous Internet access for students nor a robust and standardized testing platform. We really need to move to a 1:1 device scenario and when we do, the solution will be more costly and a bit stuck in the past all so that we can support a test platform that was built in the early days of the Internet.

    The world is quickly moving towards mobile and just as the Education community begins to realize the importance of preparing kids for their futures using the same technology rich experiences they are used to using outside the classroom, we should be very conscious of the incredibly rapid pace of change happening in that world right now. Mobile is the future. Tablets are the future. Are we testing kids for their future? Not without mobile and touch we’re not.

  • If A Tree Falls In The Forest…

    I usually don’t post episodes of my rebootED and smallschoolbigtech podcasts (videocasts?) on this blog because after all, each show has its own site where they live. They also can be found on YouTube and iTunes but for all that, discovery is still an issue. I’m no marketing genius and wether or not anybody watches or listens isn’t really why I spend the time and energy to post them. If nobody watched, I’d still do it because it’s an amazing learning experience for me. Just like writing this blog. However, occasionally an episode comes along that I think is pretty awesome and I’d really like people to discover. This happens to be one of them. So watch or not, it’s up to you but in this rebootED episode Mike and I reflect on new models for PD, EdTech choices for the classroom, new Pedagogy for 1:1 and changing culture in schools.

     

  • iOS7: So Far, Not So Good

    So iOS 7 happened. Two months into the start of a new school year. Again. And right after we handed out iPads to teachers and students. All that UI training, gone. Poof. The number one question I get now; “Where did the airplay icon go?” Seriously. Maybe it’s a good thing people can’t find it, because teachers are no longer able to airplay for more than a few minutes before the connection drops. Just as we had teachers excited about using Mirroring in their classrooms, iOS 7 happened. The solution? Power down the iPad and restart. Not exactly the user friendly iOS 6 that made tech in the classroom easy.

    And Configurator? Well, all I can say is thanks for setting the default behavior to update to the current iOS, cause that’s what they all did. Before we changed it to never. Unfortunately there are some apps that just plain demand iOS 7. I guess they are too good for iOS 6 now. That means we can’t load them onto iPads that we haven’t updated which means teachers can’t use them, which pretty much defeats the purpose of the iPads because they run Apps, it’s what they do. But if we update to iOS 7 to install the Apps teachers want, we might have to un-supervise and re-supervise them all, and that’s not much fun. We’ll also lose our Management profile, which doesn’t like to load via Configurator for some reason. Oh, and we have to go through the Welcome screen again. Sometimes the old wifi settings stick and sometimes they don’t. It’s quite the mess really.

    And don’t get me started on VPP and all the promises of over the air app installation and supervision. It’s October. Where are all the things that mattered to us in education? Sure the interface is more Android like, but can I pull an app back from an AppleID yet? No. It’s not nice to tease.

    Today I was using Skitch on my iPad mini which has been on iOS 7 since day one and after a few app crashes, the whole iPad totally crashed. It went into a restart during my demo. The only thing missing was a BSOD. Not cool iOS 7, not cool at all.

    All in all, this has been the worst iOS update since I’ve been working with iPads in education (like the iPad 1!). Everything that was good and right with the iPad for the classroom is basically broken at the moment. It’s time for a fix Apple. Past time.

  • Mobile Carts Suck

    Mobile Device Cart
    They look so nice on day 1. Can’t wait for day 180.

    I don’t know how else to say it. Mobile device carts pretty much suck as a way to increase student access to technology. Particularly when carts are shared between classrooms. Take a school with just one mobile device cart to share between all the 3rd-5th grade classrooms. The logistics of dividing up the days and weeks for equitable cart time would make a FedEx employee cringe. Then there is the time spent taking devices in and out of the cart, hoping they are ready to go from one classroom to the next, not to mention all that time spent moving the cart around campus. We’ve all seen it, the giant cart being ferried from room to room by students in a harrowing run of bumpy side walks, stuck wheels and the grass of Doom.

    Frayed Cables
    This cart is shared between 12 classroom

    And then there is the responsibility factor. With shared carts, no one is every truly responsible for what happens to a cart or it’s devices. All the check out sheets and daily logs in the world can’t make everyone who uses the cart care about it as much as you do. It’s inevitable that a device’s Tab key will go missing without anyone noticing for a week or one device won’t charge anymore or a cables will get crunched. Whatever it is, it won’t be anyone’s fault but it will affect everyone’s ability to use the cart effectively in their class. This is the biggest downside I see to the cart model. The cart is a Nomad. It belongs to no one.

    Now before you say, “So computer labs are better!”, let me say, No! they aren’t. Computer labs suck too, but for different reasons. Labs require dedicated space, power and cable infrastructure investments (using a 48-port switch on a table top and daisy chaining power strips along the floor doesn’t count) and fixed desktops don’t allow for flexible learning environments. That’s not to say that a dedicated media lab per school isn’t an awesome idea but labs as a way to provide daily access to technology integrated learning environments aren’t the answer.

    What about a mobile cart in every classroom then? Best of both worlds? Access for everyone, mobile, and flexible. Well, that would certainly address a lot of the issues with shared carts. For a district that doesn’t trust it’s kids to take devices home, carts in every classroom is really the only answer to increasing student access to technology on a daily basis. However the cart still represents a cost overhead that could go into buying more student devices, presents challenges with power cords, wastes time taking out and putting devices away and provides a convenient conveyance for a thief to take all 36 devices in one haul. But certainly a cart is better than no devices in the classroom at all.

    Power Cord Mess
    Power adapters installed by the teacher. A for effort!

    The bottom line, if you haven’t guessed already, is that to me anything short of providing every student a device to take home is a half measure. It’s trying to jump the canyon in two leaps. By assigning a device to a student they have ownership of it. By allowing them to take it home, they have responsibility for taking care of it and charging it every night. We’ve been sending books home with kids for years. This really should be no different.

    That’s why I’m very disappointed in LAUSD’s 1:1 iPad roll out. The administration obviously wasn’t prepared and they didn’t adequately prepare the community. Not only that, but they approached the device as something to be controlled, as if student learning could be confined to just those bits that LAUSD determined was required. They artificially constrained the devices and missed the point of providing every student with access to an internet connected device. Worse, they made it harder for the rest of us to get 1:1 programs off the ground.

    1:1 for everyone. With open devices and lots of communication to students, parents and staff. It sends a message of trust and empowerment to students, provides the opportunities for teachers to transform learning in their classrooms, makes device support much simpler, requires less overhead for storage, power and time and spreads the risk of loss across all individuals.

    How are your carts working out for you?

     

  • Missing The Point Of EdTech

    miss-the-point
    http://forums.autodesk.com/autodesk/attachments/autodesk/248/20411/1/miss-the-point.png

    When I was a kid (back when TVs were square and 3 feet deep) and I had a question, I asked the adults in the room. I’m talking basic stuff like How tall is the empire state building? What’s the biggest animal on earth? How big is the biggest animal on earth? What happened to the dinosaurs? And no offense to any of the adults in my childhood but the answers I got from them weren’t always the most accurate. Later we got an encyclopedia set and I vaguely remember looking things up but eventually I stopped. Mainly I think because it was hard and by then comic books were more interesting to me than facts anyway. In the Army I learned all the answers (well, mostly all) could be found in the Manual given the patience to follow the troubleshooting steps (The Army had some of the most detailed technical manuals I have ever seen even to this day). Fast forward to college, where I discovered the Internet and Search. AltaVista and then Yahoo changed my life forever. During the course of my career, Google search and the Internet have taught me way more than I ever learned in college. Today search is still core to much of what I do as a technology professional and even as an educator but my effectiveness has been greatly augmented by the use of twitter and Google Hangouts. The ability to instantly connect and collaborate with other people around the world has opened up a whole other dimension to my learning. Which is why I find it so very frustrating that the power of search, social media and collaboration is still, in 2013, severely limited for students and poorly understood by the majority of educators.

    What power might that be? Well as an example, my daughter turns eight next month. She is a voracious reader and is constantly running into new things as she reads. She’s also very inquisitive but neither myself nor my wife are always around every time she has a question. And when we are around, we don’t always provide the best answers off the top of our heads either. In fact, what we do more often than not is pull out our iPhones and search for answers to her latest questions. Last year when my daughter got super excited about the Titanic, my wife searched youtube for videos about the titanic and looked up wikipedia articles about the voyage. Today the kid is searching on her own for basic research and word definitions. We have even started playing around with voice search and as that technology matures over the next few years, I’m sure my soon to be three-year old will one day stop asking mommy and daddy questions that we then look up on our phones and go straight to the source and ask Google, because the internet is all about disintermediating the middle man (in this case, the slow old parents). Especially for the basic stuff.

    Somehow my daughter, who is in 3rd grade, is now reading at a 5/6th grade level. By any definition she is functionally literate enough to make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn but in today’s analogue classroom, a classroom without a device for every student, I would argue that she remains functionally illiterate. Why? Because the world has fundamentally changed. Because being able to read through a predefined set of information laid out in a scripted order out of a textbook or being able to identify facts handed out on a worksheet are incredibly obsolete skills in today’s connected world. These are the skills of my past. They are not the skills she will need for the future. Unfortunately, these obsolete skills work just fine for school as it is today and therein lies one of the biggest challenges facing education.

    What would happen if I were to teach my daughter the effective use of Google Search and then sent her to school with an iPad and free rein to use it to look things up as needed. Imagine the potential I would have unleashed. Free of the limitations of information scarcity, she would have access to anything and everything she needed to answer just about any question she might think of. In fact as I write this, I’m trying to think of something she might want to know that she wouldn’t be able to find at least a blog post about on the Internet. And if she did come across something like that, how fun would it be to sit down with her classmates and try to find information about it together? She would not be constrained by the textbook, the workbook or even by the teacher’s knowledge of a subject. She would only be constrained by her own search abilities and her ability to collaborate with her peers. She would be empowered to find answers, discover problems and develop solutions. Her digital search literacy would define her ability to learn and her learning experience at school would be profoundly different from what it is today.

    That is why I find the notion of adopting new curriculum, even digital curriculum, (ie. new textbooks and workbooks) profoundly troubling. And yet that is the discussion many schools are having right now to prepare for the common core. You can’t teach digital search literacy with a textbook. And you can’t practice digital search literacy without regular use of internet connected devices. Private schools know this. Innovative schools know this. Heck, even LAUSD knows this at some level. Why doesn’t everyone know this? Every kid needs a device, connected to the internet and really, they needed it five years ago. In 2013, every kid needs to be empowered by edTech, not limited by it. Computer Lab time is limiting. Six computers in the back of the classroom is limiting. Shared carts once or twice a week is limiting. Computing primarily for basic skills reinforcement is limiting. Every kid needs a connected device, it should be their’s and they should be able to take it home.  In addition, they need to learn how to search. Kids should be expert searchers by the time they reach middle school. Anything less and we’re leaving our kids unprepared for the world they are living in today, not to mention the world they will inherit tomorrow.

    If I was still in the classroom and had a class set of devices, I wouldn’t worry about what apps to use or how to use the devices to cover the content or even what I wanted kids to create with them. Not at first anyway. The first thing I would teach would be search. And we’d practice it every day.

  • Doing More With Less In A Post Desktop World

    Saturday I presented at the CAPCUE Tech Fest 2013 event. I plan to write a post about the event itself shortly but after sharing my slide deck on twitter I was asked if there was audio of the presentation as well. Um, no. But I did more or less the same presentation for the School Leadership Summit conference back in March. So for anyone interested, here you go.

    And here is the updated slide deck (I streamlined the math in this one):

     

  • SAN Be Nimble, SAN Be Quick

    This is Part 5 of a multi-part VDI saga. In part 4 we left off with a split environment, two four year old overloaded SANs and a whole lot of virtual desktops running poorly on them. As SAN IOPS and disk space were two of the biggest culprits in this evolving crisis, I went looking for a solution. Enter Nimble Storage.

    Nimble CS260G

    I was introduced to Nimble storage by our County Office of Education. They were early adopters of Nimble and had only good things to say about them. So I took a hard look. At first their claims seemed like magic. VDI class IOPS on 7200RPM spindles. Impossible. In fairness to our current SAN provider, I looked at several options, including upgrading our existing system. However, to meet the actual demand of what our VDI environment had become, upgrading turned into replacement. And don’t forget I had a single controller issue that I needed to solve for our mission critical servers. I was also trying to think long term, by considering the Memory and Computing restrictions that were going to hit in April 2014 when Windows XP support goes away and we’re faced with upgrading the VDI environment to Windows 7.

    On decision day, I had three proposals before me.

    Option 1: Replace the current NetApp SAN with a flash based, dual controller model with some faster storage and continue using the existing 4 year old shelves for capacity. My main issues with this were complexity and cost. The NetApp management requires specific SAN knowledge and the 4 year old shelves would need to be replaced in short order, which would be an additional cost.

    Option 2: Replace the existing Server Blades and Chassis with the latest and greatest in integrated storage. This was actually a very elegant solution that allowed for plenty of overhead for server and storage growth in the future. However, growing the VDI infrastructure was not the direction I was headed and adding more Big Iron just wasn’t in my play book.

    Option 3: Install a 3U 36TB Nimble CS260G array and run the student desktops on it. The administration was stupid simple, the cost was less than option 1 or 2 and the solution would take next to no time to implement. The only question was, would this magical technology actually work?

    Well, I decided to find out.

    On install day, we rack-mounted the Nimble and connected the dual controllers into our 10Gbps Storage VLAN. We had a Nimble engineer onsite that walked us through configuring the interfaces and making sure everything was cabled correctly. We verified failover (there was a bug, since resolved, that actually prevented failover to the shared iSCSI IP address that took us a few hours to finally track down) and auto-support and then we started making Volumes. I have to say making volumes was easy and good thing too, because for VDI, nimble recommends no more than 50 VMs per volume. Divide 1500 by 50. Right.

    Connecting VMWare ESX 4.1 hosts to Nimble involved some configuration on the ESX host command line, which is not necessary on VMWare 5 hosts. Once that was done, the hosts connected no problem. Then it was a simple matter of moving the VDI masters over to the new data stores and re-configuring the pools to use the new volumes. It all took less than two days to complete. Once the migrations were done, the student VMs were all running on the Nimble and anecdotally, performance improved across the board.

    For the rest of the school year, storage performance faded into the background, at least for the student virtual desktops. For staff, it was another matter. Our staff virtual desktop situation progressively worsened, with desktops continuously running out of C and D drive space, running low on memory and still experiencing slow overall performance. The 8-10 year old re-purposed desktops continued to fail with intermittent errors. Our servers were still running on a single controller SAN and Server Room Air Conditioning failures and power outages were yet in our future.

    In part 6 (perhaps the final installment) – What 120% CPU utilization on a Nimble Array really means and the final solution to VDI issues in the district.