University of San Diego Extends Distance Learning Into Europe

Silver Peak Systems, Inc. announced that the University of San Diego (USD) has streamlined the expansion of its international studies program to Madrid by replicating curriculum into VMware vCloud Air over a Silver Peak accelerated WAN.

“The USD is consistently ranked among the top national doctoral universities for undergraduate study abroad participation,” said Christopher Wessells, vice provost and CIO, USD. “The large volume of global study abroad participants presents a basic challenge to offer faculty and students nearly identical experiences with core academic and administrative information systems, irrespective of global location. Consequently, the University Information Technology Services unit has identified a robust and flexible cloud solution that can address growing global data and systems requirements. This solution offers a rapid, affordable and highly secure way to migrate data overseas.“

VMware vCloud Air was chosen for its ability to extend USD’s VCE Vblock System and vSphere infrastructure to Europe, which provided geographic proximity to the USD Madrid Center.The university extended its footprint over 5,500 miles (8,800 kilometers) over the public internet to vCloud Air’s UK-based data center. Long distance and varying quality levels of the Internet negatively impacted application performance and were a potential impediment to USD’s plans. To accelerate connectivity to vCloud Air, USD turned to VMware vCloud Air partner, Silver Peak.

Silver Peak’s Unity transformed USD’s long-distance 10Mb/s public internet connection into a secure WAN fabric performing at up to 150Mb/s of effective throughput into and out of VMware vCloud Air in the UK.

“With Silver Peak and VMware vCloud Air, the options for expanding our course content globally are limitless,” said Mike Somerville, IT manager, systems support and chief cloud evangelist, USD, and president of the board of directors for the VCE user group. “I can’t even imagine what dedicated infrastructure and an MPLS network would cost us to connect our remote campus in Madrid. Once Silver Peak was enabled with vCloud Air, data was moving so fast that I wanted to keep moving files into the cloud. The performance improvement was unlike anything I’ve seen before.“

Adding Silver Peak to the VMware vCloud Air and VCE Vblock System environment
solves two major challenges for the USD:

• Initial migration: Replicating the university’s VCE Vblock System-based servers and Blackboard learning environment of approximately 500 VMs with an average size of 5 GB from San Diego to the vCloud Air UK data center is reduced from 26.5 hours to one hour.
• Ongoing content updates and remote access: Regular updates of hundreds of Blackboard courses from San Diego to Europe is accelerated by 20x, almost instantly updating course content in a matter of sec. Remote access from Madrid to the vCloud Air data center for Blackboard and other content is also improved, with consistent performance and delivery of distance-learning content regardless of Internet conditions between Madrid and vCloud Air.

At VMworld Europe 2014, Silver Peak demonstrated how its Unity WAN fabric is extending USD’s US-based data center, based on the Vblock System, to VMware vCloud Air in the UK.

Watch the demo