SUCCESS STORY

Nevada School District Speeds Netbooks Learning with Acronis Snap Deploy 4

Photo by Jim Manner

In a mass deployment, Snap Deploy takes between 25 minutes and two hours to do many machines simultaneously, depending on the size of the image.
IT Director Jim Manner

Organization: Lincoln County (Nevada) School District www.lincoln.k12.nv.us Sector: Education K-12 Environment: Hundreds of Acer netbooks that needed to be deployed each September Key Challenges: Need for a deployment solution that: Permitted deployment of custom software configurations quickly on a class-by-class basis Substantially reduced manual intervention and errors involved in deployments Allow technology specialists to spend less time deploying and more time working directly with students Solution: Acronis Snap Deploy 4 Benefits: Only about 5 minutes of administrator effort required per machine Between 10 20 machines are deployed at a time using multicasting Technology administrators at each school can quickly create, deploy custom software configurations on a class-by-class basis

Lincoln County School district serves nearly 1,000 students who reside in the seventh largest county in the United States as large as the entire state of Massachusetts in southeast Nevada. The region is known both for the great natural beauty of its Cathedral Canyon and as the location of mysterious Area 51. Named a Blue Ribbon Schools Program award winner by the U. S. Department of Education, the school district prides itself on its strong technology programs. A grant from the Nevada Department of Education three years ago allowed Lincoln County to create a pilot program that made it possible to acquire 140 Acer netbooks with built in WiFi and to give them directly to students as their own personal computers. Since then the number of machines being deployed has risen to more than 400. Each machine is packed with grade-specific learning application software. After two years of machine-by-machine, bare-metal builds at the beginning of each school year, the pilot programs technical director, Robert Sidford, requested the school districts IT director, Jim Manner, to seek a more efficient, less labor-intensive solution for its 2011 Fall semester. And because he would be passing much of the responsibility for the individual classroom software deployments to education technology integration specialists, he wanted it to be easy to use. He chose Acronis Snap Deploy 4.

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Manner considered a few options, including Norton Ghost but it was a recommendation from Marcia Hurd, one of the school districts technology integration specialists, that caused him to consider Snap Deploy. As Hurd explains it, I used to work as a value added reseller. When faced with the prospect of deploying multiple systems for classes at the school district, I realized the manual process would slow down my ability to introduce technology applications in to the classroom, which was one of my main responsibilities. So I thought to call former clients to find out what they would recommend for our situation. One client, who once used Symantec Ghost, told me he had since switched to Acronis Snap Deploy. In making the final decision, we found Snap Deploy more specifically suited to a deployment application, Manner adds. Plus, it can be used to recover a system to its original state. Additional features reinforced the decision, including Snap Deploy 4s multicasting feature and its ability to optionally deploy an image to dissimilar hardware with little effort.

Ease of use is critical

Snap Deploy 4s new user interface integrates several formerly separate functions into a cohesive, easily implemented application. Manner manages the netbook inventory, master image library, licenses and deployment with schoolbased tech coordinators. Once he ships units to each school, technology integration specialists like Marcia Hurd take over, adding software applications needed to create a master image for each class. For fifth grade, Hurd takes a single new netbook out of the box, installs updates for all the included products, and then adds in open-source learning programs like Tux Math and Tux Paint, an education-specific Web browser and products like Edmodo, ePals and Google Apps for Education. Manner then steps in to initiate deployment.

Deployment accelerated through multicasting

The district takes advantage of a new Acronis Snap Deploy 4 feature to rapidly assign individual machine settings such as student name and IP address, and then its time to multicast a final image for each student grade at a rate of 10-20 netbooks at a time on an office table, driven through a switch from the master netbook. The entire process is completed in a fraction of time it would have taken to do manually, limited only by the amount of time it takes to write 25 to 50 GB of image data to each machine. Multicasting further frees administrators to assist students in their studies. In a mass deployment, Snap Deploy takes between 25 minutes and two hours to do many machines simultaneously, depending on the size of the image, Manner says. This is a fraction of the amount of time it would take to do the job manually.

Universal Restore feature a benefit

The district us just beginning to use the built-in Acronis Universal Deploy module to allow them to deploy images to dissimilar hardware. This will be an important time-saver for us, Manner points out. Currently we have five different models in play and usually about three different models at each school.
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Copyright 2011 Acronis, Inc. All rights reserved. Acronis, Acronis Snap Deploy and the Acronis logo are registered trademarks of Acronis Inc. in the United States and other countries. Acer is a registered trademark of Acer Corp. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Other mentioned names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners and should be regarded as such. Technical changes and differences from the illustrations are reserved; errors are excepted. 2011-09