Unisys Es7000 Server Tackles Workload At California's Sixth Largest School District - Product Information

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Dec 25, 2000

California's Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD), one of the nation's fastest-growing public education systems, has ordered a Unisys e-@ction Enterprise Server ES7000 to provide the computing capacity needed to handle burgeoning administrative and academic workloads, Unisys said recently.

The Unisys ES7000 at the school district -- the sixth largest in California and the 17th largest in the U.S. -- will support over 59,000 students at 50 schools, to which SAUSD will add 11 new schools in the next two years. By providing the capacity needed to streamline administrative workloads on a huge scale, the server will help SAUSD teachers focus on the delivery of high-quality instruction to students. The administrative solutions can be accessed via a Web browser or directly online connecting 3,000 classrooms.

SAUSD's 16-processor Unisys ES7000 will run the district's SCHOOLMAX solution for managing administrative functions such as attendance, grade reporting, enrollment and collection of census data. The solution will also help boost academic performance and reduce administrative workload by analyzing standardized test scores to measure academic competency and achievement on an annual basis. The server will also run financial applications.

"When searching for the right computing platform to handle the reporting functions of our schools, we wanted something with the built-in headroom needed to accommodate our needs five years down the line," said Paul Bewley, SAUSD director of Information Technology. "As SAUSD plans to widen its reach with 11 new elementary schools and two new high schools, we will rely heavily on the ES7000 to provide scalable, open service to reproduce critical student and financial data with swift response times."

Based on the revolutionary Unisys Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) architecture, the ES7000 provides an array of computing capabilities required for enterprise-class computing and well known to users of large-scale computers, but unprecedented in computing environments using Microsoft and Intel technology. The de-facto standard architecture in the market for large-scale Microsoft- and Intel-based servers, CMP technology is also sold by Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and ICL.

"Educational resources are at a premium at school systems across the country. SAUSD is proactively addressing this challenge by making IT infrastructure investments that maximize the value of the available resources," said Peter Samson, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Server Business, Unisys Systems and Technology. "By using the ES7000 to lift administrative reporting demands off teachers' shoulders and onto the ES7000, the district is using leading-edge e-business technology to enable them to spend more hours on their true responsibility -- teaching. We believe that other school districts will do the same when they see how dramatically such a decision can raise the quality of schooling."

Designed for the power of future Intel IA-64 Itanium processors, the ES7000 today accommodates up to 32 Intel Pentium III Xeon processors, which can be field-upgraded to IA-64 Itanium when that technology becomes available or combined with Itanium processors in the same server. These advantages enable the ES7000 to match the performance of UNIX systems in enterprise-class e-business and other critical applications at a fraction of the price.