Tallahassee CC Overhauls Infrastructure with IBM

Tallahassee Community College in Florida has revamped its administrative infrastructure, switching over to IBM software, servers, and storage systems, according to information provided to us by IBM. Mainline Information System, an IBM partner, worked with IBM and the college on the implementation.

The infrastructure overhaul at Tallahassee CC involves a wide range of administrative systems, from finance to student information, as well as the school's portal, Web sites, and e-mail hosting for students, faculty, and staff. The college had previously been operating with about 1 TB of storage for these systems. That has now increased about twenty-fold without an increase to the school's technology budget, according to IBM.

"We looked at offerings from all the major storage hardware and software vendors, and selected IBM based on the reliability, flexibility, and service that both IBM and Mainline were going to bring," said Bill Campman, vice president of information technology at Tallahassee Community College, in a prepared statement. "Reliability, service and cost are major factors in determining how we can shape our technology offerings in support of our students and faculty--and the fact that IBM and Mainline came to us with this solution and improved our storage infrastructure by [20] terabytes, we could not be more pleased."

The deployment, which was implemented in a multi-phase rollout, includes two IBM System x3950 servers, which are connected to an IBM System Storage DS4800, for running administrative applications, including HR, finance, and student information. The school's sites, portal, and e-mail are also using the storage system. Storage management and backups are handled by IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.3.

Tallahassee Community College in Tallahassee, FL serves about 14,000 students and employs roughly 1,000 faculty and staff.

About the Author

David Nagel is the former editorial director of 1105 Media's Education Group and editor-in-chief of THE Journal, STEAM Universe, and Spaces4Learning. A 30-year publishing veteran, Nagel has led or contributed to dozens of technology, art, marketing, media, and business publications.

He can be reached at [email protected]. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidrnagel/ .


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