Varrow

Founded in 2006, Interactive Achievement was created by current and former educators to develop better benchmark assessment tools. The founders’ goal was to create a program that gives educators an accurate assessment of student performance throughout the school year so that students can be better prepared for end-of-year testing. Interactive Achievement’s software provides division-level administrators, subject area coordinators, principals and classroom teachers with a robust databank of questions from which to develop a variety of student assessments. In just four years, Interactive Achievement has expanded to more than 75 school districts throughout Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, with more than 250,000 students having answered more than 86 million questions. As the company continues to grow, it strives to create new ways for educators to track student progress and assess potential, creating more productive educational communities along the way. Interactive Achievement’s specialties are K-12 Software, Teacher Resources, Online Testing, Reporting and Data Disaggregation.

Interactive Achievement’s strategic vision requires a viable infrastructure platform for their applications and systems. They rely heavily on their core infrastructure technology in order to serve their customers; therefore, the infrastructure platform must be scalable, highly resilient and cost-effective, allowing them to focus on their core business – software development. Because Interactive Achievement is in the Software as a Service business,they wanted to partner with an organization with in-depth data center experience and technical leadership using the industry’s leading solutions from Cisco, EMC and VMware.

Interactive Achievement selected Varrow as their technology partner to design, implement and manage their core infrastructure, enabling them to attract new clients and further enhancements to their core application – onTRAC. The solution was designed not only to handle the current business requirements easily, but also scalable to support their explosive growth.

Goal:
Interactive Achievement experienced incredible growth over four short years, quickly outgrowing their existing multi-tenant hosted infrastructure. To plan and implement a new infrastructure, they sought to partner with a technology solutions company experienced in managing mission critical data center technologies. Interactive Achievement’s critical business requirements were increased agility and scalability, in addition to a trusted partnership with an
experienced technology partner.

Solutions:
Varrow leveraged computing and network technology from Cisco (UCS Blade Servers and Switches), virtualization technology from VMware (vSphere), unified storage from EMC (Celera NS120), de-duplication/ back-up technology from Data Domain and load balancing appliances from Citrix (NetScaler VPX). Our fully integrated solution provides Interactive Achievement with the best scalability and performance the industry has to offer, coupled with Varrow’s Managed Services 24x7.

Results:
Interactive Achievement’s new infrastructure reduced the number of physical servers from 13 to five in a fully virtualized operating environment; plus an additional physical server capable of hosting multiple virtual guests for development and testing, significantly reducing their time to market with new software updates and releases.

Interactive Achievement Case Study. PDF