Customer Stories

University of Central Florida College of Medicine

Date : 2/1/2011
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There are so many variables involved in deploying an IT infrastructure from the ground up — space, power and cooling, performance, data protection — but whatever challenges we faced, Dell had been there before and was able to give us sound advice.

Henry Glaspie, Director of Information Technology, University of Central Florida College of Medicine, United States

Challenge
To prepare an IT infrastructure for a brand new school, the University of Central Florida College of Medicine had to fit all its servers and storage into one rack in borrowed data center space while a new facility was constructed. The infrastructure had to be powerful and flexible enough to meet the school’s performance and high-availability needs, while remaining within the limited footprint.
Solution
 Deploy VMware® on Dell™ PowerEdge™ blade servers with Intel® processors. Centralize storage with Dell EqualLogic™ iSCSI SAN arrays. Equip students and faculty with Dell Latitude™ laptops and tablet PCs. Streamline backup and recovery with a data protection solution from Symantec™.
Benefits
• 90 percent reduction in TCO for IT with virtual servers, blades and Ethernet storage
• Fit server and storage footprint into a single rack, while maintaining high availability
• 50 percent more cost-effective blade solution compared to other major hardware vendors
• Ability to expand capacity two-fold with no additional space required
• 15 minutes to deploy a new virtual server
• No planned downtime required for server maintenance
• Failover of virtual machines in seconds
• Retired a standalone environmental monitoring appliance due to rich capabilities of Dell management tools
• Projected 50 percent decrease in backup data with Symantec Backup Exec™ 2010 deduplication