Marcum Technology Provides Stability, Reliability and Availability for Higher Education
I feel compelled to write this message of thanks for your continued unwavering support for our institution. Last week after our UCS outage in the Data Center, your immediate response and assistance was the main reason we did not experience any major impact to business and IT operations. It is my understanding that you were otherwise engaged but made the decision to come to our aid after understanding our predicament. These moments underscore the value of our relationship and it is my hope that we will continue to work together in the long term.
— Director of Infrastructure and Network
ABOUT THE CLIENT
This university was founded as an independent school of medicine and is the oldest private medical school in its region. It was rated by The Princeton Review as one of the “Best 168 Medical Schools.” The school has evolved into a top center of international education, drawing students and faculty from 140 countries and establishing a track record as the top provider of doctors into first-year U.S. residencies for numerous consecutive years.
THE CHALLENGE
Out of Date and Unstable Infrastructure
Troubled by aging and problematic technology infrastructure, the university was facing challenges in meeting the functional needs of its faculty and student body. Specifically, the school’s technology systems were exhibiting deep-seated issues with slow performance and instability, causing frustration for the user community and impacting the school’s ability to deliver services.
In a recent incident, a major part of the infrastructure was affected by power issues at a key facility. This crippled students’ ability to access the remote learning platform and participate in scheduled classes. The university felt compelled to modernize its technology systems in order to provide a more secure, stable and substantially improved user experience for faculty and students.
THE GOAL
After a thorough analysis of existing systems and taking into account the future needs of our client, Marcum presented a design that is decidedly more stable and secure and that can meet the school’s performance and reliability needs today and well into the future.
THE PROCESS
The university engaged Marcum to perform an assessment and engineer a new design that would deliver stability, reliability, security, and performance. Marcum provided recommendations and an implementation plan that addressed each of the university’s articulated needs.
Marcum’s design incorporated the new NetApp FlexPod systems, a state-of-the-art converged infrastructure that leverages best-in-class technologies from some of the leading innovators in the industry. Utilizing VMWare as the hypervisor, the new solution combined the power of NetApp storage systems, Cisco’s Unified Computing System servers, and the Cisco Nexus fabric into a single, flexible architecture that modernized the University’s infrastructure while allowing for future expandability.
THE SOLUTION
Marcum successfully deployed the converged technology to both university sites and continuously monitors the systems to ensure they remain up-to-date with the latest, most stable software, to ensure maximized efficiencies, the latest security enhancements, and better overall performance.
The complete solution provided a more robust, reliable and highly available infrastructure with the necessary redundancy to virtually eliminate any possibility of a systems-down issue in the future. What’s more, performance improvements and an enhanced interface has elevated the user experience.