Transforming IT service delivery for the public sector

Las Cruces Public Schools (LCPS) is a school district headquartered in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The second-largest public school district in the state, LCPS is the district where all learners thrive, with over 21,000 students across 25 elementary schools, nine middle schools, and six high schools.

To deliver high-quality education to thousands of students across the district, Las Cruces Public Schools (LCPS) depends on its digital capabilities. For the IT department, one of the key goals is to ensure uninterrupted access to a diverse range of systems and services, from student information and financial accounting systems to identity management, data protection, disaster recovery, and cybersecurity tools.

Marco Torres-Sanchez, Systems Administrator Lead at LCPS, says: “Our IT systems are the nerve center of the district, handling grading, attendance, resource planning, and more for 21,000 students and 4,000 staff members across more than 40 locations. Our budget is always under pressure, so we need to deliver high availability and performance for these systems while keeping our costs under tight control.”

For many years, LCPS has relied on a virtualized infrastructure of around 200 virtual machines (VMs) to deliver its services. While this environment had served the district well, LCPS saw storm clouds on the horizon.

“When our vendor gave us the price for renewing our virtualization technology licenses, we were shocked by how much they had shot up—we simply couldn’t afford it,” continues Torres-Sanchez. “What’s more, our legacy SAN storage systems were approaching end of life and becoming complex and time-consuming to manage. And to compound the challenge, the native backup capabilities of our previous arrays were increasingly unreliable.”

LCPS decided to look for a new virtualization technology platform, backed by high-performance block and file storage with effective data backup capabilities.

“Once we’d decided to rip and replace both our virtualization and storage technologies, we saw an opportunity to go further,” explains Torres-Sanchez. “Our vision was to create a modern private cloud that would allow us to transition from traditional VMs to ultra-efficient Kubernetes containers. Looking even further ahead, we aim to share this cloud platform with other school districts and public organizations in the state—empowering us to pool our resources, reduce operational costs, and drive service innovation.”

After evaluating several virtualization alternatives—including staying with VMware or moving to Proxmox, Microsoft Hyper-V, full open source KVM, OpenStack, or Canonical MicroK8s—LCPS selected Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation for its new private cloud environment. Combined with Kubernetes data management from Portworx and all-flash storage from Everpure FlashArray//C™, the Red Hat and Everpure solution delivers high-performance persistent storage, reliable disaster recovery orchestration, and frictionless data mobility.

“Everpure solutions are the perfect fit for Red Hat OpenShift,” says Torres-Sanchez. “The CSI [container storage interface] driver on our old arrays just wasn’t fit for purpose. That’s because traditional CSIs are inherently limited by the ‘reservations’ required by the SCSI protocol in block storage, which restricts volume mounting to a single node. While effective for data integrity, this architecture creates significant operational friction at scale. Managing hundreds of volumes and their snapshots often results in stuck volumes during failed transitions, requiring cloud administrators to manually detach and recover resources.”

He continues: “However, Red Hat OpenShift, Portworx, and FlashArray all work together seamlessly. Portworx Backup enables us to recover individual VM files—something that wasn’t available in the first iteration of our platform. To deliver innovative features to our users, we implemented Everpure File Services, which provides users with self-service recovery for individual files and folders for the very first time.”

After experimenting with various Red Hat OpenShift cluster configurations, LCPS used the Red Hat Migration Toolkit for Virtualization to move its VMs from the previous hypervisor to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Taking advantage of the warm migration feature, the IT team minimized downtime and disruption for end users by keeping its VMs running during the process.

In parallel, LCPS deployed an Everpure FlashArray//C50 system to replace its two end-of-life SAN storage systems. With remote support from Everpure, the IT team quickly deployed and configured the new all-flash solution.

“Our Everpure engineer was extremely knowledgeable, which helped make the implementation go pretty much flawlessly,” recalls Torres-Sanchez. “We’ve now consolidated our principal storage and backup target into a single array. Despite my 27 years of experience telling me otherwise, the Everpure Platform is so reliable that I decided to break the habit of a lifetime.”

The combined Red Hat and Everpure solution quickly unlocked major operational efficiencies for LCPS. By migrating all its VMs to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and leveraging native compression and deduplication from Everpure FlashArray, the organization has ample headroom for future data growth.

Pablo Solis, Systems and Identity Administrator at LCPS, says: “The levels of deduplication and compression we’re getting from our FlashArray are almost unbelievable. We are measuring a data reduction ratio of 13.1:1 and currently using just 28% of our installed storage capacity. Everpure File Services has also allowed us to offload several of our old file servers, allowing us to reclaim compute, memory, bandwidth, and time for our team.”

With Red Hat and Everpure solutions at the heart of its new private cloud infrastructure, LCPS is sprinting ahead with its transformation initiative while avoiding a massive 185% license-fee increase from its previous virtualization technology provider.

“We’re the first public school district in New Mexico to create a private cloud environment of this kind, and Red Hat OpenShift, Portworx, and FlashArray solutions are crucial enablers of our success,” comments Torres-Sanchez. “Standardizing on Red Hat and Everpure makes everything much simpler and more cost-effective. We no longer need to train our people on lots of different technology stacks, and there is now a much clearer delineation of responsibilities when it comes to technical support.”

As it gains familiarity with the new solutions, LCPS is steadily automating and accelerating key administrative tasks.

“With our previous VM platform, there was always a great deal of manual work involved in spinning up a new environment,” says Solis. “With [Red Hat] OpenShift Virtualization and Portworx, we’ve defined templates that complete the same work in just five minutes—88% faster. The difference is like night and day. As we shift from VMs to containers, we predict that we’ll drive up our efficiency further still.”

LCPS has big ambitions for its new private cloud platform. The organization is currently deploying a new disaster recovery environment that will harness active-active data replication to enable nondisruptive updates and near-instant failover in the event of unplanned production downtime. 

Looking further ahead, LCPS has a detailed roadmap, including expanding its use of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to enable infrastructure-as-code provisioning. The district also plans to create a data lakehouse, which will unlock new AI and ML services.

“In the medium term, we’re planning a POC for dual-purpose GPU servers,” explains Torres-Sanchez. “In the daytime, we’ll use the environment to deliver virtual desktop infrastructure for student labs. Overnight, we’ll run ML workloads from data injected from a data lakehouse—supporting everything from custom large-language models for teachers to threat detection for our cybersecurity team. Our Red Hat and Everpure solutions will be vital to deliver these capabilities.”

LCPS sees Red Hat and Everpure as close strategic partners for the private cloud journey ahead.

“Historically, the education sector has often lagged when it comes to digital innovation, so it’s really cool to be working with industry-leading players like Red Hat and Everpure to do something unique in our space,” says Solis.

Torres-Sanchez concludes: “Together with Everpure and Red Hat, we’re creating a platform for innovation that will help reduce costs and bring new and better digital services to people across New Mexico.”