One of the largest school districts in North America, serving over one million students and operating more than 1,800 schools is responsible for managing IT assets in each location. These assets include power distribution units (PDU), uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), servers, storage, and network devices.

As with many organizations that have accumulated assets over time with no centralized management system, the school district lost track of what they have in each of their 1,800+ schools. This presented several challenges, including:

1. Unknown assets drawing costly power but not carrying any workloads
2. Hardware without the latest firmware updates that present a security risk
3. Reliance on error-prone, resource intensive manual audits
4. No logs to capture changes in the environment that help reduce means time to repair (MTTR)
5. Inability to effectively optimize capacity and reduce energy consumption and waste

“With Hyperview, we now have complete visibility into our entire asset inventory across the district. This has allowed us to be far more effective and efficient in managing our IT resources, while reducing operational costs and wastage.”

Operations Manager at US School District

The school district set out to implement a centralized infrastructure management system that would provide visibility into every asset in every school location, so that they could be managed and monitored with ease.

Upon evaluating several software providers, the school district chose Hyperview, primarily for the platform’s strong asset management, monitoring, visualization, and discovery capabilities.

After deploying the Hyperview data collectors on their network to enable authenticated, agentless asset discovery, they were able to capture and create a digital twin of every asset across their 1,800 schools within the platform. In less than 30 days, they had a complete and accurate asset inventory that allowed them to take proper measures to optimize capacity, reduce energy consumption, remove vulnerabilities, and identify potential security risks. Furthermore, they discovered that approximately 30 percent of their server fleet were zombies– servers that were still connected to the network and drawing power, but not carrying any workloads. The district proceeded to decommission these, which in turn, increased their capacity, reduced their power consumption and operational costs.

Hyperview is now the school district’s single source of truth for IT assets. The platform provides a unified management experience with trackable key performance indicators (KPIs) that are only accessible to various teams through fine-grained access control policies created by the administrator.

By using Hyperview’s robust asset management tools, the school district was no longer in the dark when it came to their entire IT asset estate. In addition to identifying and decommissioning zombie servers from their fleet, the district is now able to:

1. View all their network-connected assets in a single pane-of-glass
2. Automate change management and logs
3. Replace manual audits with instant, up-to-date, and accurate reporting
4. Monitor resources like power, temperature, humidity, compute, storage, and network
5. Remotely manage assets across 1,800+ schools
6. Discover potential power-consuming zombie servers for removal
7. Identify vulnerable hardware with outdated firmware
8. Monitor the health of UPS batteries and perform proactive preventative maintenance
9. Enable 24x7x365 monitoring and receive alert notifications
10. Significantly reduce operational costs while replacing several fragmented tools