The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) has chosen SAS to consolidate and house data from the state's school districts. As hosting service provider for the North Carolina Education Cloud (NCEdCloud), a Race to the Top initiative, SAS will house servers used by local education agencies (LEA) for critical business functions.
The goal of the NCEdCloud is to provide a reliable server infrastructure for K-12 education statewide. Using a portion of the state's $500 million Race to the Top federal funding, the NCEdCloud will facilitate the migration from LEA-hosted server infrastructure to cloud-hosted infrastructure as a service.
Consolidation is expected to save LEAs $10,000-$15,000 a year, funds that can be spent on other LEA programs. In total, the state will save an estimated $1,000,000 annually on server support. The exact amount each LEA will save is variable, based on hardware purchase price and annual support agreements.
The server consolidation plan, developed by NCDPI and the Friday Institute, allows each LEA to decommission its existing server hardware and obtain that functionality from SAS. This cloud-hosted infrastructure will include data center locations that reduce costs while providing a secure platform. SAS will place the servers in a high-security data center facility equipped with power backup and redundant network connections.
The pilot phase of the server consolidation includes up to 20 LEAs. Each LEA that opts in to the centralized SAS systems for the pilot will receive the initial year of hosting at SAS at no cost to the LEA. NCDPI will use Race to the Top funds to cover migration costs during the pilot phase, including physical site assessments, security audits, any necessary operating systems upgrades, backups, and help desk support.
