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FlexPod Improves Efficiency, Productivity at Technical College System of Georgia
Green Technology Featured Articles
November 15, 2013

FlexPod Improves Efficiency, Productivity at Technical College System of Georgia

By Ed Silverstein
TMCnet Contributor

The Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG) oversees the state's 23 technical colleges, adult literacy programs and varied economic and workforce development programs. A few years ago, there was a problem with the system’s aging technology, as technology is increasingly important for its many students and programs. In the data center if a hard drive failed too many times systems could fail. The servers were costly because of energy and cooling demands.


 The data center was running out of space. If they wanted to expand, an enterprise backup system would cost over $100,000. More server capacity meant added cooling, which would cost $50,000 for a redesign.

 The college system wanted technology to consolidate storage and server infrastructure.

 “What I was looking for was technology that could let me run both my server and storage network over the same infrastructure,” Steven Ferguson, senior network engineer for the college system, recalled in a statement quoted by Ed Tech Magazine. “It just became too expensive to run two separate networks.”

 Ferguson turned to FlexPod as a solution. FlexPod is a compute, networking and storage solution. It was developed by Cisco (News - Alert) and NetApp.  It uses Cisco’s server and switching infrastructure and storage technology from NetApp. Also included was a VMware hypervisor.

 There is improved efficiency and productivity with the new technology. “It takes us minutes instead of hours or days to roll out applications to support project teams,” Ferguson said.

Also, there is backup technology. “With FlexPod and VMware, if we lose one or two blades, the guest operating systems in the blades that go down are automatically moved to another server,” Ferguson said.

 In addition, now they can add up to 100 virtual desktops on a single blade. Also, the college system runs VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) on tablets through XenApp and XenDesktop from Citrix Systems (News - Alert). Users get full access to desktops using any device.

 Also, the college system is using FlexPod with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems in three of its colleges. That means lower costs. Using a Centrex system could mean $30,000 a month for voice service. But using FlexPod means costs are lower than $21,000 a month. Added to this is $6,000 a month for services. “So for roughly $2,000 less than the $30,000 they’ve been paying monthly for voice service, the colleges get more redundancy, better processing and a full data center refresh, plus voice service,” Ferguson said. 

 The colleges will likely continue to add more FlexPod and VoIP systems – as budgets allow. That continues to lead to savings and more flexibility as well as improved scalability.




Edited by Cassandra Tucker


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