School saves time, money and energy with Dell KACE

Woodbridge High School in Essex says it has shaved £14,000 off its energy bill since installing a Dell KACE systems management appliance with the help of IT solutions provider Joskos Solutions back in June 2011.

The appliance provides asset, change and patch, problem, incident, configuration and security management functions as well as desktop power management capabilities.

Charlie Cochrane, network manager at Woodbridge High School, said the device's  power management tools were a key selling point.

"We tried running a few stand-alone power management tools using scripts but none of these worked as well as we had hoped. The Dell KACE solution has allowed us to save £14,000 by turning computers off automatically overnight," he said.

Cochrane said that many of the appliance's functions were available on different systems but by using one device the school benefited in terms of costs, time and ease of use.

"We had a number of systems such as Red Beam for asset management and other systems for different functions. It was costing more to have contracts with different suppliers for the same functions that Dell KACE provides.

"The appliance provided the school with the most efficient way to manage our IT resources in an automated way, saving the school time on general day-to-day tasks," he said.

The school has also used Dell KACE in its migration to Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010. The migration took three days instead of the three weeks that the school had allotted and Cochrane said the appliance has exceeded expectations and given the school several benefits.

"The KACE system allows us to enable users to install particular software on their machines, set-up and monitor licensing and has patch-management for Microsoft, Apple and Adobe.

"Many of the other solutions that we looked at, such as Altiris' IT Management Suite, could only do 80 to 90 per cent of what Dell KACE can do," he said.

Cochrane said that the school was looking to use Intel's VPro chipset in the near future to manage and protect its desktops.

"The technology allows access to the network computers that are not showing up or are not working, so you don't have to send somebody out to that machine, you can go into it remotely," he said.

The school has 1,600 students, 850 computers and a three-person IT team.