Lone Star College System Turned to EMC and VMware

EMC
Corporation announced that Lone Star College System, a growing community college system in Texas, has turned to EMC and VMware
to build and deploy a private cloud computing infrastructure to deliver
IT-as-a-Service to over 90,000 faculty, staff and students at more than a dozen
locations.

Customer Benefits:

• Saved more than
  $600,000 in capital expenditures
• Reduced energy
  usage by 66%
• Increased business
  agility with delivery of new IT services from 3-4 months to less than a week
• Achieved five
  nines (99.999%) availability for all critical applications

Prior to deploying a cloud computing infrastructure, Lone
Star College System struggled to meet increasing demand for IT services from
its faculty, staff and students. Additionally, the college system faced
challenges controlling costs and managing its distributed infrastructure, which
experienced frequent outages that would often disrupt lessons in the classroom.
With 13 locations, and another five opening in 2011, the college system’s
current environment was no longer sustainable. To support this growth, drive
down costs and address performance challenges, Lone Star embarked on the
journey to implement a cloud computing infrastructure with a virtualized
environment using unified storage systems, software and services from EMC and
VMware.

"Without EMC and VMware, we couldn’t have achieved our
transformation to the cloud and deliver IT-as-a-service," said Link
Alander, Lone Star’s Associate Vice Chancellor of Technology Services.
"The tight integration of VMware and EMC technologies combined with the
expertise and support we get from EMC and VMware professional services have
been critical to our adoption of cloud. We are now able to deliver new IT
services to our students, faculty and staff in less than a week compared to
three to four months as a result of our cloud transformation." "Our
private cloud allows us to meet the needs of the business and add strategic
value to the organization," added Lone Star Vice Chancellor and CIO Shah
Ardalan.

EMC and VMware cloud computing infrastructure enabled Lone
Star to move to a private cloud computing model. Lone Star’s environment is
more than 90% virtualized using VMware, resulting in a more reliable, agile and
efficient environment for students and faculty.

"Our rapid expansion was overwhelming our traditional
physical IT infrastructure," said Alander. "With the new equipment,
we saved over $600,000 in capital expenditures by virtualizing and
consolidating with EMC and VMware technology, and we reduced our energy usage
by 66 percent."

Alander added: "With EMC and VMware as the foundation
of our private cloud computing infrastructure, we’ve achieved ‘five nines’
availability of our critical applications in the cloud. That has translated to
essentially zero downtime compared with weekly outages we used to endure.
Additionally, we are able to dynamically swing capacity to critical areas such
as registration systems before the semester begins or grading applications as
the semester ends. We are amazingly more agile and have achieved remarkable
resource utilization while spending a lot less time on administrative
tasks."

Lone Star’s cloud infrastructure is stored on 450 terabytes
of EMC unified storage. The college system’s VMware environment comprises the
vSphere platform as the virtualized foundation of its cloud infrastructure,
vCloud Director for secure resource management of 824 virtual machines, and
vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) software for automated disaster recovery.
Lone Star also uses EMC Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) technology, EMC
RecoverPoint for continuous remote replication (CRR) and disaster recovery, as
well as EMC Avamar solutions, Avamar NDMP Accelerator for NAS and EMC NetWorker
software for integrated data deduplication, backup and recovery.