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CampusEAI Consortium Expands Footprint in Switch and Data Operations Center

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 08/11/09

The CampusEAI Consortium is expanding capacity in Switch and Data's data center to accommodate infrastructure growth. The non-profit organization, which has 260 educational institutions as members, facilitates the development, exchange, delivery, and support of what it calls "community-source" software and digital content.

The consortium has developed--among other applications--the myCampus Web 2.0 enterprise portal and myCampus Web Content Management for both higher ed and K-12 environments, both hosted by Switch and Data. The portal provides an integrated Web site for campus communities to manage academic and social information, access course tools, participate in community message boards, and register for classes. The content management system provides functionality to enable multiple users to update their campus Web sites.

"Building and operating our own infrastructure for our application allows us to customize the environment for the needs of our members. We have optimized parameters such as firewall settings and maintenance windows for the needs of the educational community," said Anjli Jain, executive director for the CampusEAI Consortium. "Switch and Data gives us a secure, reliable, scalable place to house our infrastructure with access to multiple bandwidth providers to move our members' data in and out of our cloud environment."

By centralizing the hosting of their applications, Internetwork equipment, and wide area network connections and storage gear, member institutions reduce the per-service cost and gain 24/7 monitoring through Switch and Data's operations staff. Switch and Data operates 34 data centers in North America.

"We are pleased to work with CampusEAI to provide its members with the facilities for their [software-as-a-service] campuses," said Ernie Sampera, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Switch and Data. "Educational institutions are under pressure to manage increasing student populations and shrinking budgets. The data aggregation and distribution needs of the educational community are growing quickly and we give the Consortium access to world-class facilities without needing to tie up precious capital."

The organization was founded in 2003 by 14 original institutions as a response to increasing IT budget cuts, resource constraints, and needs of incoming Internet-savvy students. Among members are Spelman College in Atlanta; California State University, Los Angeles; and Mohave Community College with campuses in Northeastern Arizona.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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