SUNNYVALE, Calif.-September 19,
2011-Students, faculty, and staff are more tech savvy
today than ever before. They expect to have the latest messaging
and collaboration tools and ubiquitous wireless available to them
24/7. Despite the critical importance of information systems to
higher education, many colleges and universities such as
Baldwin-Wallace College constantly face tighter budgets, forcing
administrators to find ways to do more with limited resources.
Focused on providing high-quality, personalized education,
Baldwin-Wallace College turned to NetApp to transform the
college's IT infrastructure and gain greater
flexibility and efficiency
within the school's limited budget. According to an assessment by
Mainstay Partners, an independent consulting
firm, Baldwin-Wallace is on track to realize total benefits of
approximately $814,000 over three years-a 194% ROI over that
period.
Baldwin-Wallace College, a private liberal
arts college near Cleveland, Ohio, has 600 full-time employees and
an enrollment of approximately 4,300 undergraduate and graduate
students. In the college's IT department, a staff of four is
responsible for managing all aspects of the school's growing IT
operations. However, with limited budget and staffing resources,
the IT team was constantly challenged with accommodating the
growing demand for IT services, enabling disaster recovery,
reducing
costs, and maximizing data center resources.
Baldwin-Wallace worked with NetApp reseller
the Forquer
Group to
virtualize and consolidate its sprawling computing and storage
infrastructure. The college built its new, efficient infrastructure
with NetApp® and VMware virtualization and cloud
infrastructure technology and has virtualized over 92% of its
infrastructure. By buying up front only the amount of storage they
currently need, they were able to improve IT and cost efficiencies
while gaining the necessary flexibility to meet their evolving
needs.
"It's a common mantra these days, but we
genuinely have to do more with less in IT," said Greg Flanik, chief
information officer for Baldwin-Wallace College. "With NetApp, we
are able to achieve new levels of reliability, flexibility, and
scalability, which are on track for a one-year payback and 194%
return on investment over the next three years."
News Highlights
- By choosing NetApp as its storage foundation, Baldwin-Wallace
has achieved substatial cost savings, including $50,000 in data
center expansion costs, $45,000 in power and cooling costs, and
$42,000 in annual server and storage costs.
- VMware virtualization has increased application availability to
99.95% and has also created a centrally managed environment that
makes it easier for staff to provision servers and storage.
- The college gained more than 3.5TB of additional storage
capacity from deduplication, saving an estimated $20,000 per
year.
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 is the college's largest
application, supporting more than 1,300 faculty and staff e-mail
boxes. With NetApp technologies, the college gained efficiencies in
e-mail recovery cycles, reducing the time to restore a single
user's mailbox in Exchange Server from hours to less than 15
minutes.
- The college designed a system that allows users to recover
copies of earlier documents and e-mails by using NetApp
technologies. This self-service tool has enabled productivity
savings of nearly $70,000 annually and reduced help desk inquires
by 15 to 20 calls per week.
Supporting Quotes
- Regina Kunkle, vice president of State and Local
Government and Higher Education (SLED), NetApp:
"Providing high-quality, personalized education is
Baldwin-Wallace's mission, and key to making this happen is their
ability to meet growing student, faculty, and staff requirements
for the latest in technology tools, despite IT budget constraints.
With a storage
foundation that's built on NetApp,
they are now able to achieve greater IT and cost efficiencies
through a shared IT infrastructure and to gain the flexibility
needed to respond to their evolving IT demands, allowing them to
focus less on technology and more on their business of delivering
high-quality education."
- Bill Reniff, chief financial officer and vice
president, Baldwin-Wallace College:
"With NetApp, we have realized major cost savings on our storage
and server infrastructure investments by implementing a more
scalable and reliable infrastructure. This has allowed us to free
up budget to invest in technologies that will keep the college
competitive in the years ahead. As we continue to expand our
educational programs, our investment in NetApp technologies will be
instrumental in helping us continue to grow."
Additional Resources
About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions
that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost
efficiency. Discover NetApp's passion for helping companies around
the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.
Press Contact:
Jessica Johannes
NetApp
(408) 822-6551
jessica.johannes@netapp.com
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