Many higher-education institutions, such as Purdue University, are challenged by slow backup and recovery times, overextended data center costs, and aging equipment as they cope with serving their faculty and students in the digital economy. Older equipment takes up more space, uses more electricity, costs more to keep cool, and doesn’t run at the peak performance required for today’s 24/7 world. In terms of backup and recovery, schools such as Purdue University are faced with data stores that have outgrown their ability to back up within normal windows. It’s not uncommon for core business applications to be taken offline for several hours to perform backups. Additionally, legacy hardware often doesn’t provide the flexibility for high-availability options. By today’s standards, this is high-risk and unacceptable in terms of servicing users (students and faculty).
There is good news in this story. If your school is due for a technology refresh, you may find that it makes financial sense to transform your data center through virtualization and cloud computing. Today’s core educational applications, such as learning management and student information systems, can run very efficiently in the private cloud. Deploying an on-premises private cloud solution offers a more cost-effective solution on high-density platforms that take up less footprint, cost less to operate, and are simpler to manage. The key benefits are 24/7 access, simplified operations, cloud-like performance, and strong security.
As you consider updating your data center, you want a partner who knows how educational data centers work. American Digital understands the world of higher education. We know the struggles colleges are experiencing as they strive to move their mission forward, attract quality students, and maintain predictable cash flows. We know large projects have many stakeholders, so we can help navigate these challenges to help achieve benefits faster. We also understand the cyclical demands on resources, such as during student registration, so our solutions provide the resource capacity and flexibility to handle peak periods of activity.
Purdue University turned to American Digital as a partner to help them transform their data center infrastructure with a converged computing solution that enabled them to more efficiently run their SAP operations on a standardized platform. They significantly lowered power and cooling costs by reducing their data center footprint as well as decreasing their backup and recovery times by 50 percent. By deploying a virtualized platform, Purdue University also benefitted from simpler IT operations — such that they could quickly provision new resources as needed. One key aspect to the project was the infrastructure solution was from a single vendor, including the servers, storage, and networking equipment. One point of accountability was key to the client. American Digital was able to provide that so there was no finger-pointing from a support perspective.
At American Digital, we are aware of ongoing technology trends and the desire to deliver services quickly in a 24/7 world. We understand the value of agility from an IT perspective and work with our clients to understand their business and technical objectives while providing high-touch service through the entire process. In today’s digital service world, it’s important for educational institutions to not only be agile, but also maintain cost-effectiveness, achieve operational simplicity, as well as feel confident that sensitive data is protected. In American Digital, you have a partner that has the environmental and technical expertise to help you modernize your IT infrastructure so you can focus on your school’s mission and service your students and faculty better.
Interested in learning more? Give us a call: 847-637-4300