Midwestern Higher Ed Compact Adds Cloud Infrastructure
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 11/29/12
Colleges and universities in 12 midwestern states now have the option as consortium partners of using cloud storage, virtual machine hosting, and Web hosting. The institutions are members of the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC), which signed a deal with CampusEAI Consortium for use of CampusCloud, which delivers these services.
About a thousand institutions are constituents of MHEC, with a combined enrollment of more than four million students. Top priorities of the compact are to establish public-private relationships to improve services to higher ed and to reduce administrative costs. A major benefit to members is that they can ride along on the coattails of MHEC through the request-for-proposal and evaluation processes in identifying top contenders for appropriate services.
CampusCloud is a 24/7 high-performance computer cluster that features:
- The use of high availability data centers built to SAS 70 II and PCI standards;
- Networks with integrated Cisco Systems hardware, VMware virtualization, and NetApp storage;
- Redundant Internet connectivity through XO Communications and Level 3;
- Symantec backup; and
- A team of dedicated database and network engineers and administrators for day-to-day operations and upgrades.
Some MHEC members already use services in CampusCloud, including the University of Southern Indiana and Lincoln University in Missouri, among others.
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.