Lone Star College System Transforms IT With EMC

EMC Corporation announced that Lone Star College System,
the growing community college system in Texas, has transformed
its IT infrastructure with VMAX 10K storage and Avamar, NetWorker
and RecoverPoint.

The college system also uses VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure
technologies for its 97% virtualized infrastructure. As part of its
transformation, it has realigned its IT organization and processes to
better support the college system’s strategic objectives by providing faster,
more reliable access to next-generation classroom technologies. By leveraging private, public and hybrid clouds for their core infrastructure with help from
EMC Global Services, Lone Star achieved enterprise agility, enhanced
flexibility, and increased performance.

Customer Benefits:

• Agility: Lone Star has reduced the time to deliver new
  services to its internal clients from months to just 2-3 days, enabling
  enhanced learning opportunities in the classroom.
• Efficiency: It has
  tripled their storage capacity, while at the same time they reduced the time it
  spends on storage administration by 20%, enabling its IT staff to collaborate
  more closely with campus leadership to identify new IT solutions that meet the
  college system’s strategic objectives of improved student learning.
• Performance: With increased
  agility, Lone Star has helped its nursing program, among others, achieve a 100%
  pass rate on qualifying exams as a result of the  technologies
  such as life-like infant simulators, that Lone Star was able to deploy.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
In just three years, Lone Star saw its student population surge from
63,000 to more than 85,000 as the need for a degree in a tough economy and
critical workforce training was necessary to compete. As a result, demands of a
larger student population were straining performance and reliability of its IT
infrastructure. Registration processing would slow down and even halt during
peak periods. Delivery of IT resources to support new classes, instructional
applications, fundraising systems and other critical systems required weeks or
even months of lead time. In addition, Lone Star was seeing increasing demands from
the community to offer new courses on technologies and skill sets, such as
Oracle databases, that require additional flexibility and scalability.

By consolidating its infrastructure onto the VMAX 10K, Lone Star has improved its ability to provide
students with the latest educational technologies and tools, respond to the needs of local employers, and increase overall efficiency
and reliability of operational systems. To enhance data availability, Lone Star
has implemented EMC Avamar, EMC NetWorker and EMC RecoverPoint.

Link Alander, CIO, Lone Star College System, said: "Our job is to make sure our IT
infrastructure is available around-the-clock. Students need to be able to work
at any time of the day or night to facilitate their learning. The end product
is having students graduate, become successful, and improve their lives.
Anytime IT can support that instructional mission of the college system, we’re
doing the right thing.

"We have transformed the
way we operate, looking at the value of the business more than the nuts and
bolts of IT. We ask ourselves, ‘how do we reduce risk, enable the strategic
initiatives of the college system, and provide a new level of service that our
users are demanding?‘ That is the evolution. Any IT departments that can help
their companies or organizations succeed needs to focus on providing
IT-as-a-Service to its clients.

"IT used to focus on what
we thought were the hottest technologies and most important projects. Now we
spend more resources and time talking to campus presidents on what’s needed to
enable Lone Star to achieve its mission.

"To stay close to what’s
happening on campus, I sit on both an IT advisory and business advisory board.
We also have a campus executive director in IT who participates in various
advisory boards at the individual campuses. This is a shift so we can plan and
align our resources better with new requirements coming out of the schools and
across the whole college system.

"For example, when our
nursing program acquired three life-like infant simulators, there was lot of
interest in getting these tools into practice as soon as possible. We
provisioned all the necessary back-end equipment so the simulators were running
in the classrooms in a matter of days. And because our infrastructure is
managed centrally and so flexible, we can regularly move the robots across
different campuses so more students can benefit from the use of the technology,
without impacting our IT environment. With innovative technologies like these
along with high-caliber instructors, it’s no surprise that nursing and several
other programs at Lone Star are reporting that students have achieved 100% pass
rates in their qualifying exams.

"In addition, now that we
have the performance to support business intelligence, we can run constant,
real-time reports on which classes students are registering for during peak
periods. As long we have the staff and classroom space, we can leverage this
business intelligence to see the hotspots and open up new sections of our
highest-demand classes. So instead of students getting shut out, we’re
improving their chances of getting into the classes they need and staying
engaged.

"We’ve become a true
service organization by listening closely to our customers and proactively
working with them to identify their challenges and solutions. It’s been a major
philosophical change. We’re now problem solvers and solution enablers instead
of strictly implementers.

"Before we devoted 100%
of our time just running our IT infrastructure. Our infrastructure is more
efficient and automated now, enabling about one-third of Lone Star’s staff to
work on adapting our processes and choosing the technologies that will enable
us to transform and grow.

"As part of our IT
transformation, we have created a new group in IT that evaluates if a private cloud, public cloud or Hybrid mix should be used to deliver a new service. No
longer does everything have to be done in-house. We leverage the scenario
that’s best for our customers so we can get their services running faster and
more cost-efficiently and with the security and availability they need. And
with the scalability of our VMAX 10K storage, we have the capacity and shooting
power to grow with the business. For example, we used the hybrid cloud to
deliver a very well-received student orientation service that was customized
from an employee orientation program.

"We’ve significantly
reduced the time it takes to roll out a new service because we’ve built this
incredibly dynamic infrastructure. When there’s a curriculum or textbook change
that requires a new software application, we identify the solution with the
business unit, and then can provision the infrastructure in 2-3 days. With 400 applications
supporting our classrooms and new ones popping up all the time, our
infrastructure’s agility is critical to student learning. It’s changed the way
we do business completely."