Case Study: Downingtown Area School District saves $400 per seat and delivers reliable district-wide virtual desktops with NComputing

Downingtown Area School District Saves $400 Per Seat over Traditional PCs with NComputing

Downingtown Area School District (DASD), serving about 12,000 K–12 students across 15 schools, faced slow, unreliable PCs that often took many minutes to boot or crashed mid-class, leaving teachers unable to guarantee student access to computers. Replacing the entire aging fleet with traditional desktops was cost-prohibitive, so the district needed a more affordable, manageable solution.

DASD centralized and virtualized its desktop environment using IBM servers running Microsoft Hyper‑V and NComputing vSpace, deploying NComputing L300 thin clients district-wide; two high‑capacity servers currently power 850 workstations with plans for 3,000. The approach cut hardware costs by about $400 per seat (roughly $340,000 saved for 850 seats, over $1M projected at 3,000), reduced energy and management overhead, sped deployment and updates, and delivered more reliable, consistent student access to computers.

Downingtown Area School District