PowerSchool Selects Rackspace to Provide Industry-Leading Secure Cloud Solution for K-12 Student Information System
Rancho Cordova, CA (PRWEB) October 28, 2015 -- PowerSchool is the #1 market leader in providing Student Information Systems that are the most safe and modern, and that improve the K-12 education experience. To ensure the most reliable, secure cloud environment for its rapidly growing base of over 2,600 hosted customers, PowerSchool Group LLC (“PowerSchool”) has chosen Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud service provider for its hosting solution, to help enable an even more differentiated and highly available secure cloud solution. PowerSchool joins the more than 300,000 customers served by Rackspace worldwide, a group that includes two-thirds of FORTUNE 100 companies. The collaboration brings together the world’s leading and most widely used student information system (SIS) with the #1 managed cloud company to offer a best-in-class cloud solution to PowerSchool customers. PowerSchool can now deliver ultra-high bandwidth, robust failover capabilities, data encryption, storage performance and systems monitoring that meets the needs of large and small school districts in the US and internationally.
This selection followed two months of intensive research and diligence for a best-in-class provider, one that is committed to working with PowerSchool to dramatically improve and expand PowerSchool SaaS in 2016 and beyond. Rackspace has proven, unrivaled experience in planning, deploying, and managing server, storage, and network configurations.
“This is a critical relationship for PowerSchool as we seek to deliver the highest quality K-12 technology cloud solutions to our customers, including the assurance that their student data is highly available and secure,” said Hardeep Gulati, CEO of PowerSchool Group LLC. “Rackspace has the expertise and cutting-edge cloud solutions to enable PowerSchool to be the market leading and differentiated cloud solution for K-12.”
Rackspace has built its global infrastructure to deliver top speeds, while providing industry-leading service-level agreements including: 100% network uptime guarantee (excluding planned or emergency maintenance); HVAC and power functioning 100% of the time in a given month; and ensuring hardware components function correctly. Rackspace has highly trained specialists that run the infrastructure, which uses the latest technologies and resides in enterprise-grade data centers positioned across the globe.
“We’re excited that PowerSchool has chosen to run their mission critical applications on Rackspace Private Cloud,” said Taylor Rhodes, president and CEO at Rackspace. “Rackspace has more than 15 years of experience supporting highly performant and robust cloud and dedicated environments, and we are confident that our Fanatical Support® and expertise will help PowerSchool scale well into the future.”
Five key improvements to the new PowerSchool SaaS environment include:
● Increased Bandwidth. Provide a redundant, bonded 10Gbps network connection which is 5x greater than the current network connection.
● Increased Failover Capabilities. Utilize virtualized application servers within a high availability virtual environment. This will provide enhanced server availability by migrating the virtual application servers to another physical host in the event a physical host becomes unresponsive or unavailable.
● Increased Data Encryption. Utilize the latest technologies to encrypt ALL PowerSchool Data at Rest utilizing XTS-AES 256-bit data-at-rest encryption across the entire storage array.
● Increased Storage Performance. Utilize a new fault tolerant EMC VMAX enterprise data storage array with twice the amount of storage capacity and 4x more bandwidth to PowerSchool servers.
● Increased Systems Monitoring. Utilize a new enterprise-grade solution for infrastructure and systems monitoring capable of processing thousands of metrics per second and provide 24x7 real-time alerts.
PowerSchool, supporting 40 million users and 13 million students in more than 70 countries, plays a central role in a network of integrated technology solutions designed to provide K-12 districts with a cohesive solution to manage all mission-critical administrative processes and instructional data.
PowerSchool has long been recognized for its secure, reliable management of student data and ease-of-use for teachers, parents and students. Significant investment in PowerSchool and a commitment to developing cutting-edge technologies such as Ed-Fi and Application Programming Interface (API) tools, as well as the investment in data security through the Rackspace services, make PowerSchool the leading Cloud SIS in K-12 education.
To learn more about Rackspace, visit http://www.rackspace.com.
Rackspace and Fanatical Support are service marks or registered service marks of Rackspace US, Inc. in the US and other countries.
About PowerSchool Group LLC
PowerSchool is the most widely-used SIS, serving more than 13 million students in the US, Canada and in more than 70 countries. PowerSchool plays a central role in K-12 education, serving as the hub of customers’ education ecosystems with robust features and APIs that allow education stakeholders to manage school processes and student data and connect diverse education technologies utilized in classrooms, schools and districts. Learn more about PowerSchool at http://www.powerschool.com.
Media Contact:
Terri Zezula, 480.280.8559, Terri.Zezula(at)powerschool.com
Terri Zezula, PowerSchool Group LLC, http://www.powerschool.com, +1 (480) 404-9616, [email protected]
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