Community colleges turn to Unisys ES7000 to revamp IT

Enterprise Networks & Servers, Jun 2005

The power and performance of Unisys ES7000 servers are easing computing demands for students, faculty and administration of a growing number of community colleges looking to streamline their data centers.

These institutions cite the Unisys ES7000's ability to offer a cost effective means of consolidating their IT infrastructures while providing students, faculty and staff enhanced accessibility to critical applications and information.

At the vanguard of this trend are Butler County Community College (BCCC) of Pennsylvania, Seminole Community College (SCC) of Florida and Lee College of Texas. With the help of powerful, "scale-up" Unisys ES7000 servers, these institutions have significantly simplified student administrative life, eased management responsibility and, most importantly, facilitated the continued delivery of quality services to past, present and future students.

Butler County Community College

For more than 20 years, Unisys has provided secure, dependable IT solutions to Butler County Community College (BCCC). When BCCC decided to standardize and consolidate its datacenter, it turned to Unisys to implement a scalable, reliable operating system.

"To meet the demands of our growing student population, Butler needed a robust, fail-safe system with reliable back-up to ensure round-the-clock access to education services for our students," said Rick Michelini, director of telecommunications for BCCC.

"We wanted to improve our IT infrastructure by expanding internal and external networking capabilities, including Internet and e-mail services, as well as the availability of data to the user community. Based on our long-standing relationship with Unisys and their clear understanding of BCCC's culture and IT needs, Unisys was the clear choice to help us standardize our data center on Windows and build a forward-looking architecture able to grow along with us."

Seminole Community College

For Seminole Community College, security was of the utmost importance in deciding how best to update its backoffice operation - yet the school also wanted its new IT architecture to establish a roadmap for the future.

"Seminole Community College had experienced firsthand the havoc hackers can wreak on an institution's IT infrastructure," said Dick Hamann, vice president of technology for SCC.

"As a result, our primary concern was to find the best solution to maintain the highest level of security. The Unix environment was the first that came to mind. However, once Unisys demonstrated the certified reliability of Windows as a more cost efficient alternative to Unix, we were sold."

Lee College

The challenge for Lee College was two-fold - the need for a more robust, reliable system to run the latest version of PeopleSoft and the desire to minimize the time burden of the student registration process.

"At the time, Lee College's application servers were critically overloaded and performance was constrained," said Dr. Carolyn Lightfoot, director of information technology and chief information officer for Lee College.

"Due to this limit in processing power, student registration and tuition administration process times were through the roof," Lightfoot said. "Today, with the power and performance of two ES7000 servers, vital PeopleSoft 8 activities are completed in a matter of minutes rather than hours. Our students, many of whom come from diverse professional backgrounds, now have access to real-time registration and tuition calculations, which means less time spent waiting in line and more time to go about their daily lives."

Within each institution, the ES7000 servers will run a variety of applications.