100,000-Person Texas College System Aces Cloud Computing Class With EMC Unified Storage and VMware

HOPKINTON, Mass., July 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that Lone Star College System, the fastest-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.  

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, Avamar and NetWorker are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries.  VMware, vCenter and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other countries.  All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation

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