Education Blog

Dell is committed to lowering the barriers preventing schools from using the best technology, and we’re happy to announce we’ve expanded the services for the Dell Virtual Labs with version 3.0.  We work  with key industry partners to make the process easier for IT staff and are excited to announce that the Virtual Lab Solution is now the first-ever VMWare Ready Certified solution for education.

Virtualization can solve many of the problems universities and colleges face today, and will continue to tackle including the consumerization of IT and the need for access to information whenever and wherever faculty, staff and students need it. Often, however, there are significant barriers. With 3.0, we’ve eliminated some of the major headaches and made the process as seamless as possible. 

Here’s how it’s helping: Gainesville State College in Gainesville, Georgia which provides 9,600 students and faculty with access to their data and online courses. “Our original driver for desktop virtualization was to provide 24x7 student access to technical labs from anywhere in the world,” says Brandon Haag, Chief Information Officer at Gainesville State College. “Then we started finding ways to innovate new uses at no or minimal cost. It’s easy to set up and replicate a Dell and VMware View virtual lab. As a result, we can bring 21st-century technologies into middle schools and help children get a leg up on careers of the future.”

With 3.0 we’ve added services that will help universities become even more efficient and effective through virtualization, resulting in saving time and lowering costs:

• We’ve worked with VMware to jointly certify the Virtual Labs solution – the first solution for Education ever certified by VMware. 
• Validation testing on additional leading applications used on campuses including: Adobe Premiere Pr CS3, AutoCad 2DLT, Wolfram Mathmatica 7, Mathworks MatLab, SAS and IBM SPSS.
• We’ve created a Virtualized Licensing Best Practices Guide, to help institutions navigate toward the best licensing packages for virtualized environments.
• Increased security - we’ve added security protocols so IT admin can centralize sensitive data and set up granule rules for multiple levels of access
• IT management time – with a consolidated dashboard, IT can easily identify and respond to issues from 100+ labs from one point, eliminating the need to run around campus and physically visit each lab to assess and address issues

You can find out more information on Dell Virtual Labs here and if you have ideas on how virtualization will impact higher education, we’d love to read them in the comment section.