Higher Education IT Trends | News

Chicago State Overhauls Management of IT Systems

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/10/10

Chicago State University, a public university in Illinois with a campus community of 7,200, will be implementing a new infrastructure monitoring platform for its IT operations. The institution will be running AccelOps for network analysis and management of systems, virtualization resources, and application performance.

"We brought in five leading vendors to present their infrastructure monitoring platforms, and only AccelOps met [Chicago State's] needs for comprehensiveness, usability, implementation, and value," said CIO Ce Cole Dillon. "[The company's] integrated infrastructure monitoring approach met and exceeded our requirements, offering compelling advantages and versatility over alternatives."

The university's IT department supports a central data center, distributed systems, and a distance learning program. Staff found it had outgrown a variety of IT management applications and open source utilities and sought a tool that could advance its infrastructure monitoring capabilities. Particular features that attracted Chicago State during its evaluation included:

• Integration: The AccelOps platform monitors performance, availability, security, and change management across IT domains.
• Visibility: The application includes dashboards, alerts, enterprise search, automated configuration management and inventory, and topology mapping.
• Out-of-the-box usage, easy implementation as a VMware virtual appliance, and the ability to set up service management criteria and monitoring.

AccelOps is available as a virtual appliance or software as a service. Pricing for the service starts at $2,000 per month.