Education IT Appliance from Zynstra Enables Hybrid Cloud Adoption for Schools

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Solution supports schools and academies transitioning from Microsoft Small Business Server and Windows Server 2003 to a managed hybrid cloud.

BATH, UK – 24th April 2014 — /BackupReview.info/ — Zynstra, the pioneer in cloud managed server appliances, today announces the launch of Education IT Appliance, developed specifically to address the evolving needs of educational establishments.

The latest addition in Zynstra’s product suite has been crafted in partnership with Microsoft and HP to meet the looming end-of-life technology dilemma that requires an infrastructure refresh for Windows Server 2003 which many establishments in the education sector are facing.

“We estimate that there are well over a quarter of a million organisations in the UK still running Windows Server 2003 and a large number also based on Small Business Server 2003, both of which are approaching end-of-life and will no longer be supported by Microsoft in the next 15 months,” said Nick East, CEO at Zynstra. “Schools and academies will not be exempt from this. They need to be seriously considering how best to refresh their IT infrastructure but that does not mean they need to incur huge costs or overhaul their way of working.”

The Education IT Appliance caters for schools and academies of all sizes, providing all the comfort and control of on-premise IT but with the economics and service levels typically associated with public cloud services. It also features an age specific content filtering capability from E2BN Protex which ensures pupils are protected from inappropriate content whilst accessing schools systems. The appliance is fully integrated with Office 365 which enables establishments to make the most of Microsoft’s campaign offering free student access under its Student Advantage programme.

Education IT Appliance enables schools and academies to securely run both local Windows and Linux workloads in virtualised containers, whilst also seamlessly interconnecting them to public cloud services though Single Sign On to applications such as Microsoft Office 365. Education IT Appliance is a completely hassle-free appliance as the whole solution is delivered as a managed IT service for a monthly subscription by the growing base of Zynstra partners.

David Smart, Managing Director of Cambridgeshire based MSP, Softwerx, commented “Recently, we’ve seen a real increase in demand for cloud services arising from schools and academies as they seek to get a more manageable  and cost efficient IT infrastructure to support their growing needs for use of IT. Naturally education establishments are cost conscious so want ‘cloud economics’ of no upfront costs and per-user pricing but don’t want to sacrifice on security and reliability. Zynstra’s Education IT Appliance combines security and performance of local IT with the economics and ease of the cloud. Couple that with the age specific content filtering to protect the students, it’s the perfect IT solution for schools and academies. ”

All of Zynstra’s cloud managed server appliances are built on the HP ProLiant server range with the unique Zynstra software that enables local IT workloads to be run as a service in virtualised Windows and/or Linux environments. Education IT Appliance offer seamless integration to Microsoft Office 365 and offer a backup and disaster recovery service on Microsoft Azure and SSO to Azure hosted applications via ADFS. Users of Education IT Appliances are also able to benefit from Zynstra’s patent pending keep current and keep consistent technology which is “built in” so that organisations need not worry about having to update systems. With Zynstra’s extensive software IP, each appliance is also provisioned, updated and managed from the cloud at a scale not previously possible.

Zynstra’s Education IT Appliance is available with immediate effect.

Media contact:
Sinead O’Connor
Atomic PR for Zynstra
+44 20 7478 7801
zynstra@atomicpr.com

Source: Zynstra

Tags: Zynstra