U San Diego Uses Cloud To Support Global Study Abroad Program in Spain
The University of San Diego (USD) has
implemented a cloud solution to migrate data to the United Kingdom, so it can
provide students in its international studies abroad program in Madrid, Spain with reliable access
to core academic and administrative information systems.
The University of San Diego Madrid semester program is an extension of USD
and offers courses in a variety of disciplines to students from accredited
universities around the world. The courses are similar to those offered on the
San Diego campus and supported by USD faculty and staff who work on site in the
university's Madrid office. However, the large volume of participants made it
challenging for the university to provide its Madrid students with reliable
access to core academic and administrative information systems.
To improve the Madrid Center's access to these information systems, the USD
Information Technology Services unit implemented VMware vCloud Air, which enabled it to
extend its existing VCE
Vblock System and VMware
vSphere infrastructure to vCloud Air's UK-based data center, providing
improved geographic proximity to the USD Madrid Center. However, data still had
to travel more than 5,500 miles over the public Internet from San Diego to the
UK. The distance and varying levels of Internet service quality negatively
affected application performance.
To accelerate its connectivity to the UK data center, the university
implemented Silver
Peak Unity, an "intelligent wide area network (WAN) fabric that unifies the
enterprise network with the Internet and public cloud," according to the
company's site. With Silver Peak Unity, USD was able to increase its throughput
to and from the UK data center from 10 megabits per second (Mbps) over the
public Internet connection to 150 Mbps over the secure WAN fabric.
The migration to the UK data center required the university to replicate its
"VCE Vblock System-based servers and Blackboard learning environment of
approximately 500 virtual machines (VMs) with an average size of 50 gigabytes
(GB) from San Diego to the vCloud Air UK data center," according to Silver Peak.
With the help of the secure WAN fabric, the university was able to reduce that
initial migration time from 26.5 hours to one hour. The WAN fabric has also
enabled the university to accelerate its course content updates and remote
access to Blackboard by 20 times.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].