Clovis Community College Learns to Think Inside the Box

Doug Myrum, a CDW data center architect who worked with Clovis, says hyperconvergence provides a number of benefits for higher education, as well as other industries. “It offers advantages for any organization that needs to shrink its IT footprint, that’s looking for high performance, less management overhead, or wants to support virtualized desktop infrastructure [VDI] and disaster recovery,” he says. “In short, the appeal is pretty universal.”

To identify the physical servers that could be consolidated within the Nutanix appliance, the IT department worked closely with CDW, a longtime partner for developing technology roadmaps and acquiring hardware and software. “We saw a tremendous opportunity for shrinking our data center footprint and significantly reducing downtime due to hardware failures,” Kia says.

The CDW team was instrumental in helping the IT staff understand hyperconvergence and prepare for server virtualization. “This was the first time we attempted virtualization, so we didn’t have the expertise to purchase the technology and then make sure the hardware and software were configured correctly to successfully work together,” Kia says. “That’s why we reached out to CDW to see if there was an all-in-one solution that could handle this right from the start.” 

CDW also helped the college select vendors and acted as the central point for communication between Clovis and these partners. “We have a lot of trust in CDW, and we relied on the team to point us in the right direction,” Kia adds.

Despite the college’s reliance on a variety of SaaS applications, Kia wasn’t ready to move a mission-critical app, such as the student information system, to a public cloud infrastructure platform. An additional incentive for the on-premises consolidation initiative was a cost analysis that showed more favorable total cost of ownership over time. “We’re small enough that the break-even point of an on-premises solution comes relatively quickly,” he says. “That may be different for larger institutions that need more extensive IT resources.” 

The six-node Nutanix model NX-1365-G5 uses Intel Xeon E5-2620 processors and a mix of solid-state and spinning disk drives. This single appliance hosts Clovis’s production environment and will support the new version of the SIS starting next year.

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The Payoff

Since the modernization, the IT staff spends much less time managing and maintaining a large collection of aging servers. This allows them to spend more time on strategic initiatives. “I’m a very customer-oriented tech person, so I believe that the more time we can devote to working directly with end users to help them with their responsibilities, the better,” Kia says. “We’re now able to do more of this, rather than having to regularly put out fires in the data center. That means we understand the needs of our population better and have more face-to-face contact with end users.”

This enables the IT department to roll out new services. For example, if someone requests a new application or capability, the IT department can thoroughly test it before moving it into production. In the past, the IT staff had to find space on a production server to test the program, which was time-consuming and drained limited resources for faculty and staff. “We now just spin up a virtual server, which is much faster,” Kia says.

The on-demand testing environment also strengthens cybersecurity by bringing new efficiency to the software patching process. “In the past, we would apply a patch or do an upgrade to an operating system, but when we tried to replicate it in the production environment, it wouldn’t work,” Kia says. “Now that we can easily create a separate testing environment with virtual servers, if something doesn’t work, there’s no harm done. We figure out how to fix it, and when it’s ready, we move it to production without end users experiencing any downtime.” 

Performance has also improved. When the old servers were purchased, memory capacity for many of them topped out at 4 gigabytes per machine. “We now have boxes with exponentially higher volumes of memory and storage space, so they respond much faster,” Kia adds. 

Now the school is ready to launch a phased upgrade to the latest version of its SIS, starting with a portal and identity management system that will go online in early 2018. The accompanying database and application servers will be implemented by the middle of the year. Server virtualization and hyperconvergence will make the large-scale upgrade easier than in the past. “The single-server environment is just not conducive to a small IT staff with limited resources,” Kia says. “Upgrading multiple servers will be so much easier in a virtual world, because we will be able to roll out the changes to each machine without having to physically interact with it.” 

To help small IT staffs find the right combination of hyperconverged hardware and server-virtualization technology, Kia recommends turning to a trusted third-party adviser for help. He also reached out to other IT leaders in higher education to learn what benefits they found and what stumbling blocks, if any, they had to overcome in their modernization efforts. Finally, if the upfront analyses and planning show that hyperconvergence makes sense, CIOs shouldn’t be afraid to make the move. “Done right, it’s a step forward that will make life easier for smaller institutions with limited IT resources,” Kia says.