The Tyler Independent School District, the largest in Northeast Texas, is leveraging technology from the EMC-backed VCE to power over 27 schools–a total of about 20,000 students and faculty.

“Looking to expand students’ ability to learn beyond a seven-hour school day, five days a week, Tyler ISD’s school environment needed to transform its IT infrastructure and become a 24×7 operation with opportunities for learning across numerous media and devices for improving students’ ability to learn anytime and anywhere,” their released statement reads.

“To address the need for change, Tyler ISD engaged VCE and EMC Velocity Partner Presidio to transform its IT environment to a highly virtualized, next-generation data center to provide its students with state of the art technology services to help foster learning.”

Tyler Independent’s IT department is now running Vblock – VNX storage from EMC, USC blade servers and VMware server/client side virtualization software all fused together in one package. The new infrastructure is superior the legacy automation system the district had in place before according to the case study, with $1.3 million in projected savings in the first 12 months alone.  There’s a total of $3 million in reduced overhead expected over the next five years.

Automation is a big factor here. By upgrading to newer gear the district can focus less on solving technical problems and more on fleshing out its online services for students, an intention that was outlined very clearly.

VCE has proven a good investment for EMC, even if it may not be as profitable as some would have wanted. The startup makes a very big contribution to the spectrum of its main sponsor’s portfolio, and that impact will only increase in magnitude as Vblock gains more and more adoption from clients such as the Tyler district.