In Summer 2012 AS worked with the Graduate School of Business (GSB) to virtualize and migrate many GSB application services (including both administrative and academic applications) to the AS virtual farm.
AS leverages virtualization and low-cost, high-performance storage solutions (based on VMware and NetApp technologies) to provision and manage the servers that run AS (and now GSB) applications.
Moving to this infrastructure enabled the GSB to both modernize its systems and reduce associated maintenance and support costs.
"The biggest thing is that we migrated several of our hardware systems to virtual servers," said David LeVine, Information Technology Operations Services Manager at the GSB. "That was a big win for us because a lot of these systems were end-of-life or approaching end-of-life."
The technology also enabled AS to migrate the GSB systems "as-is"— no additional application reconfiguration required — and with minimal downtime.
"It was a fairly seamless transition," LeVine said. "There is always a hiccup here and there, but overall we are satisfied with the end result."
Based on the success of this project, the GSB and AS have moved forward with a second phase to deploy new applications and transform the recently migrated "as-is" systems to more fully leverage AS infrastructure.
Contact Armand Capote for more information about AS infrastructure and virtualization.
