vmware Higher Education

Challenge

The customer needed professional and engineering services to assist with the support and growth of their IT operations.Required areas of expertise included server hardware and operating systems, SAN configuration and support, virtualization management, application upgrades and migrations, security and project management.

The college embarked on a project to move their existing data center across campus, replace all of their servers, and adding some additional hardware. They needed a company that could meet all their needs and had data center capabilities to help them plan, architect, acquire, install and manage hardware fort he move.

Solution

CAS provided the following services:

Design new IT Infrastructure

Information captured on the infrastructure during the review process was documented in tables and diagrams along withdescriptions. During this step, CAS reviewed existing architecture, and worked with college staff to design an environment that met existing requirements while allowing for growth and preparing the college to integrate new technology inthe future. CAS also assisted in the design and layout of the data center.

Develop an acquisition plan for hardware, software and training

Based on information gathered in the preceding step, CASd eveloped the configurations and budget needed to implement the hardware, software, power and cooling requirements needed to support the data center move.

Develop an integrated implementation plan

CAS worked with the college and other vendors to develop an integrated implementation plan including synchronization of key non-IT activities related to the facility such as completion of power and cooling, wiring, whips, etc, and integrating these elements into the IT implementation plan

Results

Execute and Manage the Relocation Project

During this step CAS provided the overall project management and engineering resources to relocate the college’s IT operations to the new data center. This included:

• Implementation and configuration of new server, storage and infrastructure equipment
• Application/Server/Device relocations and migrations, either physical moves, P2V, V2V or new hardware upgrades
• Management of schedules, other vendors and college staff