Illinois School Districts Get Affordable Cloud Services, Cut Storage Costs with BIG-IP Products and ARX
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager
- ARX Series
Tech Stack
- Cloud Services
- Storage Virtualization
- Application Delivery Controllers
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
IlliniCloud is a non-profit cooperative that provides IT services to K–12 school districts throughout Illinois. The organization hosts applications for school administration, facilities management, student performance tracking, multimedia, and library management. IlliniCloud was founded in 2007 by Bloomington Public Schools, which has one of the largest IT budgets of all 860 Illinois school districts. The cooperative uses three existing facilities owned by local districts and has deployed 30 VMware virtual servers based on HP/Cisco converged computing platforms. Internet access, video conferencing, and multimedia sharing are facilitated by Illinois Century Network.
The Challenge
IlliniCloud, a non-profit cooperative that hosts applications for school administration, facilities management, student performance tracking, multimedia, and library management for K–12 school districts throughout Illinois, was facing a challenge. The organization needed to optimize the delivery of these services through its private cloud and help member districts manage annual data growth of up to 300 percent. The districts were struggling with providing their own IT services, with budgets varying widely from district to district, leading to inefficiencies and duplicate efforts. Managing data was one of the biggest challenges districts faced; many were hardpressed to provide adequate storage capacity, and they needed better tools for managing, disseminating, and archiving data. Nearly 95 percent of school districts lacked disaster recovery (DR) plans, so applications and data were potentially at risk.
The Solution
To address the challenges, IlliniCloud chose F5® BIG-IP® Application Delivery Controllers and ARX® intelligent storage virtualization products. The BIG-IP LTM devices intelligently load balance and manage all incoming user requests, offload compute-intensive and repetitive tasks from Web and application servers, and provide advanced application security, acceleration, and optimization. These features help ensure that IlliniCloud users always have consistent and highly reliable access to their data and cloud-based applications. The ARX solution was chosen for its advanced file virtualization, storage tiering, and data archiving capabilities. It is compatible with most NAS storage devices, allowing IlliniCloud to enforce intelligent data management policies and automate storage management tasks in real time.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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