Worcester Polytechnic Institute Leverages OmniCube for Infrastructure as a Service
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Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- OmniCube
Tech Stack
- VMware vCenter
- Amazon AWS cloud
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Based in Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is one of the oldest engineering and technical universities in the United States. Among the hundreds of universities in the Boston area, WPI is unique with its center of excellence in engineering, science, technology, and mathematics, along with strong academic and co-curricular programs in the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and business. The university, ranked 62 for National Universities in the 2014 Top 100 Best Colleges by US News & World Report, prides itself on its academic core values, innovation in science and technology, and strong community. The IT staff at WPI maintains skills in a wide variety of infrastructure domains from servers, networking, and storage as well as Windows and UNIX application development and application delivery. Like many IT organizations, the IT staff had to be very efficient to handle all the application and infrastructure requests from the approximately 5000 students and faculty in the community.
The Challenge
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), a top-ranked national engineering and technical university, faced an information technology challenge of rolling out a set of new applications based on requests from the university's broad community of faculty, staff, and students. The university's IT Hosting team was looking to create 'Infrastructure as a Service' for the wide set of application requests coming from the student body, faculty, and staff at WPI. Critical requirements like 'always on' availability, agile deployment models, and ease of use and maintainability were foundational requirements to the IT team. The existing infrastructure was running on complex, expensive racks of legacy servers with networked storage provided by a Dell SAN, but the configuration was becoming expensive and difficult to scale and maintain, making it challenging to meet the new application demands. This new application initiative was of concern to the IT team because of the time it would take to expand and maintain the legacy systems, which lacked easy, horizontal scalability, integrated data efficiency, automation, and unified management. They foresaw wasted operations time managing the legacy systems that could be spent more productively on other, higher value IT initiatives.
The Solution
The IT Hosting team, under Associate CIO Jon Bartelson's leadership, chose SimpliVity's OmniCube for its new modern IT infrastructure because it was the only solution to meet all of the hyperconverged infrastructure requirements. The university's IT team was impressed with OmniCube's simple, 'datacenter-in-a-box' concept, its ability to run a wide set of application workloads, deliver 'pay-as-you-grow' horizontal scale-out, revolutionary inline deduplication, compression, optimization of all application data, and provide simple, unified management from within VMware vCenter. With OmniCube, WPI and the Hosting team found the perfect hyperconverged infrastructure solution to run the new set of applications. Now, WPI can implement powerful, policy-based data protection with replication and disaster recovery capabilities that significantly improves application service level agreements (SLAs). Included in OmniCube's hyperconverged architecture is built-in inline deduplication, which delivers IO savings and optimizes storage consumption. Because WPI had a small Hosting Services staff and couldn't afford to tie up resources with a complex deployment, OmniCube's fast installation and implementation was also a true advantage. In addition, OmniCube's scale-out design will enable the university to easily expand the use of the system in the future without a forklift upgrade.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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