A California high school in need of infrastructure updates recently turned to HPE GreenLake for a comprehensive solution. Grossmont Union High School District (GUHSD) in San Diego County has been operating for over 100 years and has 13 campuses serving over 17,000 students. The district’s executive director of educational technology services, Rick Roberts, aimed to create the best IT school shop in the state by focusing on improving the experience for teachers and students.
In the past, GUHSD relied on HPE servers and storage solutions to meet their needs. However, as technology requirements evolved, they decided to explore HPE GreenLake, an as-a-service model, during their most recent refresh about two years ago. One of the problems they faced with legacy storage was estimating future needs accurately, resulting in the need to purchase additional resources after just a few years. GUHSD wanted to avoid the constant need for additional funding, so they turned to the GreenLake model to have a more predictable operational expense rather than a capital expense.
The implementation at GUHSD includes HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, HPE ProLiant DL360 servers for storage and compute, and HPE Managed Services for monitoring and administration. The goal was to free up the IT staff from server and storage support so that they could focus on operational tasks and cybersecurity.
While the transition to GreenLake brought some resistance from the staff, it allowed them to shift from mundane tasks like patching servers to more meaningful work of managing the school’s IT environment. GUHSD did not fully adopt all the capabilities that GreenLake offers, opting to only use compute and storage services. They wanted to maintain a sense of ownership and control by keeping disaster recovery handled by their own team. Roberts believes that managed services cannot replace everything and that it is still necessary to have IT staff onsite for immediate responses.
GUHSD has been a long-time partner of HPE, and Roberts chose to stick with a familiar and trusted vendor for their transition to managed services. The switch to GreenLake was not primarily driven by cost savings but rather by the predictability and scalability it provides. Having a set monthly or yearly bill allows for smoother budgeting compared to asking for large sums of money when additional infrastructure is needed. Managed services also freed up the staff to respond to the district’s needs more efficiently and focus on critical projects such as network upgrades and cybersecurity.
Looking ahead, GUHSD plans to explore AI-powered video monitoring as a means of enhancing safety in the district. They will rely on HPE to help them select the right integrator for this deployment and ensure ongoing maintenance and support.
Overall, GUHSD’s adoption of HPE GreenLake has allowed them to improve their IT infrastructure, enhance staff productivity, and focus on the needs of teachers and students while maintaining control over critical aspects of their operations.