Morpheus Data > Case Studies > Earning high marks with VM and Application as-a-Service for diverse university community

Earning high marks with VM and Application as-a-Service for diverse university community

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Morpheus Data

Tech Stack

VMware vSphere
Dell and EMC
Bash
PowerShell
MariaDB / mySQL
Windows
CentOS
RHEL
Ubuntu
Microsoft Active Directory
BlueCat
Splunk

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Digital Expertise
Customer Satisfaction

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Private Cloud

Applicable Industries

Education

Applicable Functions

Human Resources
Business Operation

Use Cases

Building Automation & Control
Predictive Maintenance
Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

About The Customer

The customer is a large multi-campus state university with a diverse and open IT operations structure. Each college and administrative unit is in charge of its local IT needs. In addition, a centralized IT services team focuses on offering shared access to certain IT services, including hosted private cloud for dozens of groups and hundreds of end users. The university's IT department had built its own homegrown portal to serve the university. However, due to new IT priorities, the homegrown portal was no longer a key initiative moving forward. This triggered the need to find a new approach for self-service VM hosting and private cloud that was less brittle and easier to maintain.

The Challenge

The large multi-campus state university had a diverse and open IT operations structure, with each college and administrative unit in charge of its local IT needs. A centralized IT services team focused on offering shared access to certain IT services, including hosted private cloud for dozens of groups and hundreds of end users. The university's virtual machine (VM) hosting service had built its own homegrown portal to serve the university. However, due to new IT priorities, the homegrown portal was no longer a key initiative moving forward. This triggered the need to find a new approach for self-service VM hosting and private cloud that was less brittle and easier to maintain. The IT team was ready to get out of the “wrench-turning” business of manually provisioning applications and VMs to university end users, many of whom had non-technical skillsets. These users often needed access to IT services after hours or on weekends and desired a self-service approach to provisioning. It was time to find a way to reduce service ticket volume, centralize hosted VM platforms, and up service delivery.

The Solution

The IT team first connected with Morpheus Data in 2017. Morpheus matched exactly what they were looking for on several fronts. One was value, with Morpheus coming in at the right price point. Speed of integration was another, with Morpheus offering the best integration into vCenter and other out-of-the-box tools. When looking at other available products, the team found that some were too focused on public cloud. Morpheus hybrid cloud management did a better job balancing on-premises and off-premises cloud. Morpheus also provided a better choice of core functions like application lifecycle automation and backup management. Security was a critical factor too. Morpheus provided a dedicated environment for secure data. Government grants require a certain level of security before funds are awarded. Morpheus enabled the IT team to meet the university’s directive to implement a centralized, governed approach to data security controls. Once the decision was made to go with Morpheus, the IT team deployed a proof-of-concept (PoC) in a matter of hours, connecting Morpheus to their VMware environment and leveraging existing Ansible automation. Collaboration and communication with the Morpheus team was fast and easy—using a combination of on-site visits, ticketing, and the Slack platform.

Operational Impact

Day-to-day operations of the VM-as-a-Service (VMaaS) offering are now running smoothly.
All production is done on the Morpheus platform, and users are assigned to groups with different policies and access levels applied for scoping the Morpheus service catalog.
As needed, the central IT team at this state university provides its own consulting and 24x7 support service to users in various departments, running application logic on top of VMs.
The university community is happy with the Morpheus-powered VMaaS platform and recognizes the value of self-service.
IT departments across the University utilize VM Hosting resources to provide IT services to their Academic Colleges or departments. College administrators, professors, and system admin staff all benefit from the flexibility and time savings that come with VM hosting and as-a-service application.

Quantitative Benefit