PreK-12 public school district

About the Client

Founded in 1907, this pre-kindergarten to 12th-grade public school district out of Tulsa, Oklahoma creates various progressive education programs for over 12,000 students throughout the region. The school district is composed of over 1,500 staff members dedicated to helping students prepare for higher education and achieving successful adult careers.

Pain Points

The school district was facing several challenges. First, its buildings were susceptible to massive flooding since all school locations were less than 10 miles from the Arkansas River, and the schools’ onsite data center was only 300 yards away from their administration office. Second, ongoing construction caused major shutdowns of their backup generator, which powered their data center. These outages exposed some schools to serious data loss risks. Third, the IT director feared that ransomware attacks could easily compromise their systems, as other schools in the area had been hit by these security threats. Lastly, the organization didn’t have a best practice DR plan in place and their previous DR service merely replicated their NetApp SANs. Looking for a long-term solution, the IT director sought a cloud service that didn’t require an expensive refresh in the next 3-5 years.

Solution

The school district received RapidScale’s CloudRecovery (DRaaS solution) and CloudBackup. These solutions provided 4-hour RTO and near real-time RPO of their critical servers, including backup of all data to RapidScale data centers. RapidScale’s disaster recovery services and offsite/local backup solution brought high availability and redundancy that alleviated concerns around downtime and data loss. While the school district’s IT administrators utilized RapidScale for support, they also were able to manage certain parts of their environment on their own.

Why They Chose RapidScale

One key differentiator was RapidScale’s ability to provide a customized level of management and support based on the school’s needs. Even though the IT team used RapidScale’s data center and DR services, they still had control of and access to their environment. Rather than taking over their IT environment, RapidScale became an extension of their IT team. The IT director was impressed by the fact that, if they needed to, they could make a single phone call to RapidScale to quickly restore their production environment in the cloud. While the IT team leveraged RapidScale cloud management, they loved the flexibility of managing certain parts of their environment themselves.  

Another differentiator was RapidScale’s ability to provide a more cost-effective solution and more value with their management and support. The on-premises option they were originally looking at would have cost them approximately $250,000 over three years, not to mention the additional costs of labor to manage and maintain it all. This investment would have needed to be refreshed in the next 3-5 years. Instead, the RapidScale solution costs them $126,000 over three years, offering substantial cost savings, and RapidScale can manage the entire solution if need be.