CUSTOMER STORY

South Washington County Schools looks to meet digital learning requirements of all students, improving district’s agility and reducing risk with Dell Technologies IT infrastructure and covers immediate need for remote learning equipment by working with Dell Financial Services.

• Halves the time for 2 IT transformations without increasing budgets
• Cuts data center footprint by two-thirds and reduces risk
• Ensures students have the IT tools they need to learn
• Decreases initial capital costs by spreading IT payments over 2 years
• Increases IT staff efficiency so they can focus on helping students learn
• Improves the district’s agility

South Washington County Schools is a rapidly growing K–12 district near Saint Paul, Minnesota. Every year, district teachers have less than 10 months to help 18,500 students meet — and ideally exceed — their learning goals. To gain insights that can help boost individuals’ outcomes, teachers depend on the district’s IT.
To ensure continuous access to core IT tools, the district had budgeted to replace its end-of-life HPE infrastructure. And after spending months reviewing and testing options, South Washington County Schools chose a solution it designed with Dell Technologies, based on a four-node Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).

Just as the district was about to purchase the HCI, COVID-19 erupted. “My manager of systems and I became nervous about our ability to complete our datacenter projects as we watched COVID-19 moving across the globe. We both knew we had to immediately order 5,200 Chromebooks so all students could learn remotely — and to get ahead of the device shortage that was coming. We had spent so much time designing our HCI, but we could not buy the VxRails and the Chromebooks.”

When South Washington County Schools explained its predicament to its Dell Technologies team and they offered a new solution. “They asked if we were interested in financing our infrastructure in a different way,” Berkowitz explains. “Of course I was excited to hear that. And I was even more excited when I heard the really low rate we could get from Dell Financial Services and how we could split our payments over two fiscal years.” By choosing a leased technology-ownership payment strategy, South Washington County Schools could afford to meet its IT goals for the year.

Within weeks, the district bought its HCI and Chromebooks — plus Dell Technologies ProSupport Enterprise and Deployment Services — without increasing its budget. “We completed an IT transformation we thought we’d have to put on hold for at least a year by working with Dell Financial Services,” says Berkowitz.

By choosing a Dell Financial Services lease as its technology payment strategy to purchase its new HCI, South Washington County Schools reduces its data center footprint by two-thirds, cuts risk and boosts IT staff efficiency. “Every dollar and minute we spend need to help educate students,” Berkowitz says. “What we’ve accomplished by partnering with Dell Financial Services has exceeded our expectations.”