Case Study: Rockford Public Schools achieves 99.99% uptime and sub-15-minute disaster recovery with Nutanix Cloud Platform

Rockford Public Schools transforms IT infrastructure with Nutanix partnership

Rockford Public Schools, serving 27,766 students across 42 buildings with a 5,000-strong staff, struggled with aging, multi-vendor IT infrastructure that complicated maintenance and threatened the 99.99% uptime required for critical student information, business systems, and campus safety tools. The district’s small infrastructure team faced unpredictable hardware lifecycles, cooling and networking issues, and difficulty ensuring consistent access to systems that directly affect student safety and education.

RPS consolidated its environment onto the Nutanix Cloud Platform—using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, AHV virtualization, Prism, Cloud Manager, and Unified Storage—deploying 125 virtual servers to host core workloads like SIS, business apps, and video surveillance. The move delivered simplified, centralized management, predictable budgeting, and on-demand scalability, while boosting reliability to 99.99% uptime, enabling sub-15-minute disaster recovery, reducing operational complexity and costs, and positioning the district to adopt on‑premises AI and other future technologies.

Rockford Public Schools

Jason Barthel

Chief Information Officer