Purchasing Nutanix with E-Rate funds provided a great opportunity to shift funding back into technology that people see and use regularly.
Innovation isn’t the first thing most people think of when they discuss public schools. But for the Green Bay Area Public School District, embracing new tools and technologies is deep in its DNA.
“Our goal is to educate all students to be college, career and community ready to succeed in our diverse world,” said Amy Jaeckel, Executive Director of Technology and Information at Green Bay Area Public School District. “We want technology to be used as a meaningful tool for them to reach their goals.”
Serving more than 17,900 students at 36 sites, the school district relies on the network infrastructure to support its student information system, streamline enrollment processes, and power applications that help administrators and instructors work effectively.
“We've have approximately 100 total servers within our environment that we support, including print servers and file servers,” said Zach Patri, Infrastructure Supervisor at the district. “We also support programmers who develop applications for our teachers.”
The district maintains a diverse environment, with operations extending on-premises and into the cloud.
“We support a local Microsoft Active Directory environment,” said Patri. “We are also working to migrate some of our workflows for management of devices over to a Microsoft Intune environment, with operations in the hybrid cloud and on-premises.”
As with most public schools, budget concerns are top of mind at the district. Following VMware licensing changes, the district began seeking a more cost-effective path forward.
“We were having some issues supporting our legacy hyperconverged infrastructure, and then the pricing changes with VMware licensing emerged, motivating us to explore other options,” said Patri.
Enhancing Performance and Reliability
After considering solutions from a variety of vendors, the district chose a solution that includes Nutanix Cloud Manager, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure and Nutanix Unified Storage. The modernized infrastructure was designed to improve resiliency to support essential operations for students, staff and administrators.
“Our emphasis over the last several years has been building resiliency into our network,” said John Blohm, the district’s Network Operations Manager.
Led by Nutanix partner CDW, the deployment process went smoothly, facilitated in part by the Nutanix Move cross-hypervisor workload migration tool. The Nutanix Technical Support team also provided the district’s IT organization with additional guidance.
“We had a good feeling about the support level that we would have with Nutanix if anything were to go wrong,” said Patri. “Nutanix was there to support our onboarding efforts and it was nice to have our initial assumptions backed up during the deployment.”
Modernizing and Saving Big with E-Rate
After the Nutanix solution was up and running, the district began to realize cost savings and greater operational efficiency.
One immediate benefit was the ability to utilize E-Rate funding administered by the federal government to help offset expenses. For Green Bay Area Public School District, E-Rate reimbursed the majority of the cost of the district’s Nutanix solution, according to Jaeckel.
“Nutanix informed us that the solution was E-Rate eligible, and we were fortunate to have E-Rate consultants guide us through the entire process,” said Jaeckel. “That knowledge gave us a powerful ability to be able to take action.”
“The cost savings is definitely a huge benefit, and the ability to use E-Rate to purchase part of our solution was a big factor in that,” added Patri.
Consolidating and Streamlining Storage
Migrating scattered data from different systems to Nutanix Unified Storage also enabled the district to achieve some powerful administrative outcomes.
“Nutanix is helping us consolidate storage from our siloed systems so that we can minimize our storage footprint,” said Patri.
Bringing together disparate files onto a single, dependable platform that’s easy to manage has also saved administrators time. With a worry-free storage solution, Patri and his team can focus on other priorities.
“I definitely don’t need to check up on our storage solution as often,” said Jerry Campbell, Network Operations Manager at Green Bay Area Public School District.
“When we don’t have to talk about it, it’s doing what it needs to do,” added Patri. “I think that we are barely scratching the surface on all the benefits that Nutanix Unified Storage could eventually yield for us.”
Surfacing the Facts That Matter
Consolidating multiple infrastructure elements under the Nutanix solution has given the district a strong level of unified visibility through the Nutanix Prism dashboard.
Nutanix Prism is designed to simplify the management of virtualized datacenter environments by consolidating compute, storage, networking, automation, and disaster recovery into a single, intuitive interface—streamlining operations and limiting the need for multiple standalone tools dashboards.
“When I log into Nutanix, I rarely feel like I need to click further than the initial dashboard, which is really nice,” said Patri. “Alerts are always front and center so I don’t have to do extensive searching to learn more about an issue.”
“But I don't find myself logging into Nutanix Prism very often, which is actually a good thing for a person in my position, because it means the solution is running smoothly,” Patri added.
If an issue arises that requires customer support, the IT staff are confident that Nutanix can help resolve it quickly.
“I’ve had no issues working with the Nutanix support team,” said Campbell. “Nutanix response times have met expectations, unlike other vendors who might take days to get back to you.”
Getting Future Ready for AI and More
Green Bay Area Public School District is exploring how it can take advantage of all the features and capabilities that Nutanix can offer. For example, Nutanix Flow Network Security enables the district to create software-based firewalls to help protect its critical applications and data.
“The Nutanix Flow Network Security dashboard has a great deal of potential, and we are looking to do more with it to strengthen cybersecurity,” said Patri.
The flexible, modern infrastructure also provides a future-ready platform capable of supporting new initiatives like AI.
“The district is currently researching the use of approved tools for our environment that meet our AI guidelines,” said Jaeckel. “It’s a big lift and it's challenging but we are doing our best to educate our staff and teachers so we can be ready to use AI to benefit learning.”
The Green Bay Area Public School District’s investment in a modern, resilient infrastructure proves that innovation doesn’t require an unlimited budget—just clarity of purpose and the right partners.
By consolidating systems, embracing smarter management tools, and positioning itself for emerging technologies like AI, the district has built a foundation that can flex with whatever comes next.
Even in a climate of tight resources, Green Bay is showing how thoughtful technology strategies can strengthen learning environments today while opening the door to new possibilities for students tomorrow.
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