IT Infrastructure

North Carolina Community Colleges Slash Server Footprint To Increase Performance

• By Rhea Kelly
• 10/14/14

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Twelve colleges in the North Carolina Community Colleges system are streamlining their server infrastructure in an effort to cut operating costs, lower energy use and ramp up performance. The schools partnered with Alphanumeric Systems, a provider of business productivity services, to deploy Fujitsu M10 servers with Oracle Solaris, reducing their server footprint by as much as four times.

The new Fujitsu M10 systems are running Ellucian higher education software for the schools' day-to-day business processes such as admissions, registration, accounting, payroll and human resources. According to a press release, the NCCC campuses can now serve critical campus applications with 24/7 uptime, especially during the peak times of enrollment and end-of-year activities. The scalable setup allows the institutions to start small and pay as their server needs grow, reducing the initial system costs.

"Not only is the Fujitsu M10's price point particularly attractive, but it also allows us to easily increase the size of the system and its throughput capabilities," said Linda McDaniel, director of information services at Catawba Valley Community College."The Fujitsu M10 server also gave us the opportunity to add more local storage capacity, so we don't have to rely so heavily on our SAN for data storage."

A team from Alphanumeric helped oversee the transition, noted McDaniel. "Alphanumeric has deep technical knowledge and they're extremely responsive. They planned, scripted and automated everything for us, including two trial runs and a final production run, to make sure everything was in order when we went live."