When it comes to their IT infrastructures, academic institution IT teams have a lot in common with IT departments in the business world. Both need to offer their customers the flexibility to access applications and resources at anytime, anyplace, and on any device. They also need to provide these services with limited budgets and administrative resources while maximizing the efficiency of the data center.

Sheridan College, renowned for its leadership in the field of digital media studies, serves approximately 18,000 full-time students and 35,000 part-time students a year. Their IT department has up to 18,000 active network connections and each student may use various devices. They also have applications that serve the faculty and staff.  Key applications such as Oracle PeopleSoft and Oracle Database are running on Cisco UCS. During open enrollment there are as many as 5000 concurrent connections per second.

Migrating off its legacy SPARC architecture and consolidating its data center using Cisco UCS the Sheridan College IT organization was able to realize tremendous benefits:

• Improved infrastructure virtualization from 40 to 85 percent.
• Increased capacity while reducing the number of physical servers that it needs from 200 to 70.
• Reduced power consumption by 78 percent.
• Service levels improved and to nearly 100 percent uptime.
• Highly efficient 100 to 1 server to administrator ratio.

Most importantly, the Cisco UCS deployment has allowed the Sheridan IT team to shift focus from maintaining the infrastructure to leveraging the extra data center space for new, innovative projects. The goal being the continued success for their customers -in this instance the customers are students.

Sound familiar? These are exactly the same type of goals and results that we hear from our corporate case studies.

Read the the full Sheridan College case study

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