Fourteen community colleges (and counting) have replaced slow, aged infrastructure with power- and space-saving alternatives.
The opportunity to save money, power and space is driving a multi-campus infrastructure modernization project within North Carolina Community Colleges (NCCC), a network of 58 institutions serving more than 800,000 students. So far 14 colleges throughout the state have upgraded to new servers that are more energy efficient, use less space and deliver higher performance than the systems they’re replacing.
The backbone of the deployment is Fujitsu’s M10-1 and M10-4 servers running Oracle Solaris and Oracle VM Server. The new systems host software from Ellucian that’s tailored for campus business processes including admissions, registration, accounting, payroll and human resources.
“That’s our main system that controls pretty much all the administrative services,” says Wayman White, director of management information services at College of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City, N.C.
The school replaced its Sun Fire V890 servers from Sun Microsystems with the new Fujitsu M10 servers, which take up about one-quarter of the space occupied by the Sun gear. “The old server was at end-of-life, so we definitely had to find a replacement. It was huge, and that takes a lot of power to run,” White says. “When the new servers came up, it was like night and day size-wise.”
In addition to having a smaller footprint, the Fujitsu M10 is faster, which boosts productivity, White says. “It has sped up some of our services, such as reporting. Some of the staff probably didn’t even notice, but I know. It’s definitely worthwhile.”
+ALSO ON NETWORKWORLD: Tech’s top-paid CEOs | Top 20 colleges for computer science majors|12 jobs getting the biggest raises in 2014 | Tech’s fascinating 50 |+
Another selling point is the ability to add memory and capacity as needs grow. At Catawba Valley Community College, more and more third-party software and services require access to its database systems, says Linda McDaniel, director of information services at the Hickory, N.C., college.
“The previous system lasted five or six years, and it was great, but we were just getting to the point that we were losing speed,” McDaniel says.
With the new servers, IT can add more local storage capacity, so the school doesn’t have to rely so heavily on its SAN for data storage, McDaniel says. “All of our disk slots are not full, so if we see that we need more, we can add some. With the old system, we were full,” she says. “One storage area network now is solely for backup, and it used to be we had data on it. That has helped. We don’t have quite as many disks to manage.”
Alphanumeric Systems, an IT services provider based in Raleigh, N.C., managed the rollout for the NCCC sites. Alphanumeric “planned, scripted, and automated everything for us, including two trial runs and a final production run, to make sure everything was in order when we went live,” McDaniel says.
“As a state, we try to maintain as much consistency between colleges, with the way that they’re set up, as we can, and Alphanumeric knows that,” she says.
NCCC is the third largest community college system in the nation. As the remaining sites find their existing hardware systems need modernizing, they can purchase the servers through a single contract between North Carolina Information Technology Services (ITS) and Alphanumeric.
The colleges generally run their own IT operations with autonomy, but sometimes come together to leverage their collective buying power. For example, the state of North Carolina has helped negotiate Microsoft licenses for all 58 sites, White says. “There are definitely some things that we can all do as a whole to save money,” he says.
Meanwhile, tech expectations run high at college campuses. The average college student spends more than 125 hours a week using technology, according to a study by marketing firm re:fuel agency. That puts pressure on IT.
“Students are always going to push the envelope. Which is a good thing, because it pushes us to think, ‘ok, what can we do to serve the students better?’” White says.
“What motivates me is, if I can make you work smarter, not harder, I’m satisfied,” he says.
