Virtualization update - the low end

I previously quoted from an article in The Age (Australia) that talked about virtualization.

But the part that interested me was the use of virtualization in the low end of the market. The Age talked about three examples:

These three case studies, taken from different levels of the Australian market, show virtualisation firmly in play, even at the low end of the market.

Michael King, vice-president of global education industry for IBM, says: "Especially in difficult economic times, schools of all sizes are looking for ways to save money across the board."

But the interesting one to me was Luther College:

[V]irtualisation is a work in progress and to define where it begins and ends remains tricky. At its humblest level, it could be Luther College, a co-ed school in Melbourne's Croydon Hills, moving from the use of distributed desktop PCs to thin client systems, leaving the task of processing and storage to centrally located Blade PCs in the college data centre....

Describing his school's dilemma, the school's director of IT, Chris Topp, said with school numbers growing and with a new middle school under construction, the pressure was on the IT system, which already included 850laptops and 350desktop PCs. It wasn't just cost but issues of flexibility and security that needed to be tackled.

Mr Topp says: "All expertise was being forced out to the devices on the edge of the network in both classrooms and admin departments."

Luther took advantage of a long-standing relationship with HP to install HP t5730 thin clients and HP2533t mobile thin clients in the place of distributed desktop PCs and laptops. Processing is handled by HPbc2500 Blade PCs in a central data centre that includes graphics-intensive applications such as PhotoshopSuite and 3DStudio, which used to be hard to run in the distributed PC environment.

More here.