10 Enterprise All-Star honorable mentions

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Upper Canada District School Board (UCDSB)

A NAC for A+ security

The UCDSB is responsible for administering a 32,000-student school district in Ontario, Canada. To better support districtwide learning and assessment goals, the group needed to make sure its more than 120 sites had 100% wireless coverage. Wireless lets teachers and students roam through schools using handheld and notebook computers to access learning and teaching tools -- without being tied to the typical "PC at the back of the classroom," says Jeremy Hobbs, the board's CIO.

To reduce maintenance and security issues, UCDSB spent $150,000 for Nevis Networks' LANenforcer LAN Security Appliance and LANsecure solution, which includes a 48-port LANenforcer Secure Access Switch and LANsight Security Manager for centralized policy management. Via UCDSB policies, the appliances leverage Active Directory information to enforce detailed, identity-based access for different user groups. Besides securing access, the system saves time administering moves, adds and changes for its 300 wireless access points from 600 staff-hours a month to virtually none, providing an ROI of nearly $100,000 a year.

University of California, San Francisco

Virtual-research breakthroughs

Researchers in UCSF's Immune Tolerance Network and Epilepsy Phenome Genome Project depend on IT to deliver the real-time collaboration and computationally intensive applications necessary for building, studying and reporting on life-saving clinical trials. To meet those needs, IT recently built the Advanced Research Computing and Analysis Managed Infrastructure Services (ARCAMIS) network, says Michael Williams, executive director of IT for ITN, as well as CIO for EPGP. ARCAMIS uses a Network Appliance FAS3020 SAN, HP Proliant servers, 7000c Series blades and VMware Virtual Infrastructure Enterprise 3.01 to consolidate eight distributed IT sites into three redundant data centers, two in San Francisco and one in Washington, D.C.

The SAN increased storage use to 65% from 25% under the old network-attached storage infrastructure, and provides real-time server backups and hourly disaster-recovery snapshots. By using virtualization of disk, CPU, RAM, network and servers, ARCAMIS lets IT provision and support more than 150 production, staging, testing and development servers at a 25-to-1 ratio of guests to physical hosts, reducing power consumption in the data centers by a factor of 20 while speeding server deployment time from six weeks to two hours. Because the new HP servers use remote, IP-based server administration, the same senior staff supports twice the number of physical servers and 20 times the number of virtual servers as it did before. Overall savings are $200,000 a month, with an expected $10 million return on the original $3 million investment in just three years.

Cummings is a freelance writer in North Andover, Mass. She can be reached at jocummings@charter.net.

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