Features of the Pano System supporting virtual desktops for educational and academic institutions include:
- Reduced management and support overhead by up to 70%, freeing staff for other initiatives and improving faculty and student access to information and resources.
- Rapid refresh of computer labs, allowing an entire lab to be reset to a standard configuration in just minutes rather than the days it takes with desktop PCs.
- Longer desktop refresh cycles from obsolescence-free Pano Zero Clients. Instead shared server hardware and virtualized operating systems can be refreshed from the data center, saving both refresh budgets and cutting the time for the refresh from weeks to hours.
- Greater leverage of investments in hardware and software via shared server hardware, avoiding the trap of upgrading desktops that are idle 80% or more.
Benefits from Pano System virtual desktops for education organizations and academic institutions include:
- Improved flexibility for computer labs and training rooms, with both virtual access to any desktop and software configurations along with rapid refresh of lab stations.
- Greater staff and faculty productivity from anywhere, anytime access to their desktops.
- Better leverage of IT budgets, with centralized hardware upgrades and software licenses achieving much higher utilization rates.
- Low cost provisioning of individual student desktops ensuring that course work and ware is stored on centralized servers secure from malware, data loss and equipment theft.
Pano System zero client virtual desktop help educational and academic institutions ensure compliance with:
- FERPA - Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law protecting the privacy of student education records, applied to all schools that receive funds under an applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education.
- PCI - Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards defines information security standards for enterprise hardware, software, processes and policies to protect for client billing credit card records.
- Records Retention - internal institution polices for records retention, archiving and destruction supported by storage-free Pano Zero Clients, ensuring that no local or off-site copies of records exist outside of records retention policy enforcement.
Brian Walker, Network Administrator for the University of North Texas Dallas, was charged with laying a technology foundation that would support a new 10-year growth plan for the university. Transitioning from a satellite campus into a stand-alone university, the UNT Dallas will one day serve 30,000 students. In weighing today's technology decisions against long-term costs, Walker decided to replace the PCs in an existing building and forego them completely in a new facility that opened in August 2010. Instead, Walker opted for Pano Logic zero client desktop virtualization, which would enable him to eliminate time-consuming PC maintenance visits and serve a dramatically expanded computing resources with his existing help desk staff.
Read More Video of University of North Texas
Little Chute Area School District replaced nearly 200 PCs in classrooms, computer labs and administrative offices with Pano Logic virtual desktops to shrink the cost of the five-year rotation cycle of PCs. This migration immediately reduced energy costs that the district expects to shrink further as it continues its move to Pano Logic’s zero clients. Because of the reduced energy use and Little Chute’s focus on green IT initiatives, the district is eligible to receive an energy grant from the state of Wisconsin. Read More Little Chute Area School District
Mark Lamson, director of technology at Westerly, a progressive school district in Rhode Island with seven schools, needed to provide desktop computing resources to 3,300 students and over 700 staff with an IT staff of just five. Leveraging of their prior VMware experience and infrastructure, he selected Pano Systems since their compact size and low power usage allowed installation even in older school buildings that lacked the space and power distribution needed for traditional PCs. Along with the benefits of improving data security and reducing the overhead of desktop support, Lamson expects the power savings alone to pay for the devices in about three years. Read More
The University of Maryland leveraged their existing VMware expertise to be up and running with Pano virtual desktops in just hours, deploying new users in as little as 10 minutes and reducing power consumption by up to 75%. The University also saved on both hardware and software license costs for out-of-lab use by students while the student got reliable access to the computing power and software needed for their courses. Read More
Video of Blue Ridge School District
Educational and academic institutions are continually challenged to do more with less – provide reliable desktop computing for staff, faculty, students and labs with tightly-constrained IT and budgetary resources.