The Wharton School Beefs Up Data Center with Blade Servers

• By Chris Riedel
• 06/30/08

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has a new data center built on Dell PowerEdge M600 blade servers and EqualLogic PS5000X storage arrays. The data center will allow the school to triple both its mailbox quota and the storage capacity available to faculty and students, as well as provide researchers the ability to operate a Linux grid cluster powered by the blade servers.

"The demands on the Wharton School's network are increasing and with our continued growth, we are committed to developing an infrastructure that is flexible and efficient," said Dan Alig, senior IT director of Wharton Computing, in a prepared statement. "Dell blade servers and Dell EqualLogic storage will allow us to do more with less and manage our budget as effectively as we manage our technology resources."

The new technology will help the school consolidate its IBM BladeCenter infrastructure, and allow their IT pros to set up the new M1000e blade enclosures in about one sixth the time it took with the previous hardware. As an added benefit, the Dell enclosures arrive in a single box per unit, as opposed to approximately 60 boxes with the prior setup, cutting both time investment and waste.

Additionally, the school has implemented PowerEdge R900 servers for their Microsoft Exchange 2007 environment, intended to decrease the equipment footprint while increasing the available computing power.