Thin Clients and Server-based computing....Judson ISD Poised to Deploy "New" Computers for High Schools

Judson ISD is continuing our quest to get the best computing value for our students and teachers, allowing us to stretch our limited resources. As we prepare to outfit both Wagner and Judson HIgh Schools for Fall 2010, we are keenly aware of funding limitations, yet we recognize the increasing need of students and teachers to utilize digitial resources. So we are trying to limit our endpoint device cost, while also trying to keep our approach as green as our funding will permit.

For the high schools we are not going to utilize nComputing X series devices as in the past, because we are not planning to put out as many general classroom computers, but instead we will focus on increasing the number of labs, which we feel will be better served by delivering a desktop experience from a server farm. The end user will have the look and feel of a brand new Windows 7 device and the speed of a new computer. On an old Pentium 4 computer th eend user would have no idea they are using a 5 year old computer given the performance we have seen in testing.

We are taking a two-pronged approach for delivering new desktops to our inexpensive end points. Firstly, we will reuse older computers (5-7 years old) as endpoints running Citrix Xenapp (reducing out eWaste footprint). We have tested this approach and seen extremely promising results in functionality, speed, and manageability. Secondly, where we do not have older equipment to reuse, we will be deploying nComputing L300units. We have tested several beta units and achieved very good results. nComputing has been working very closely with Judson ISD to support our testing of this brand new technology, and we believe that the L300 units will potentially be a game changing network based device. The early indications are that the unit's price point will be very low (around $200-$300) and we have already seen it outperform every $200 thin client we have tested.

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