Clemson University (Clemson), with 19,000 students and 1,400 faculty, is a Tier 1 research university that has a partnership with BMW for Automotive Research (CUICAR), develops and hosts the state’s Medicaid system, and provides services to state organizations.
Clemson found that its many constituent users wanted to access their applications in a capacity-on-demand model, while holding down the costs of IT support and ensuring disaster recovery protection through the lifecycle of their applications. Clemson’s fragmented IT environment would not support these needs, and they were looking to modernize, consolidate and virtualize their infrastructure to enable cloud services to their internal and external customers.
After a joint discovery process, the solution to Clemson’s challenges was Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM), a software product designed to help react in real-time to changing business needs with automated workload mobility and recovery management, all while reducing data center management costs. Clemson used Dell AIM, along with Dell Services, Servers and Storage solutions to:
- Migrate from RISC based platforms to Dell PowerEdge R610
- Consolidate and increase virtualization deployment
- Deploy a cost-effective Disaster Recovery, leveraging mixed storage solutions
- Create a flexible infrastructure to support on demand cloud services
- Increase application development time –to- market with a flexible lab environment
With Dell AIM, Clemson completed a rapid data center migration to a new architecture, consolidated their infrastructure and created a flexible, agile, resilient cloud-ready environment. This new Dell AIM-managed environment helped Clemson exceed customer service levels with reliable infrastructure and resulted in both operational and capital expenditure reduction with:
- 32-fold faster provisioning of physical servers (15 minutes versus 8 hours)
- 4-fold faster server migration from Sun RISC platform to Dell PowerEdge servers
- 3-fold faster testing
- Disaster recovery in minutes versus weeks
To hear more from Clemson on why they chose Dell AIM and how it solved their problems, watch the video.
M. Consuelo Ortiz is a Product Marketing Strategist for Dell with extensive Marketing and Business Development experience in IT, Semiconductors and Telecommunications