University Uses Private Cloud to Trim IT Costs While Improving Reliability and Innovation

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Education—Higher education

Customer ProfileFlorida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) is a public, historically black university in Tallahassee, Florida, with an enrollment of 11,000.

Business SituationBecause of budget cuts, FAMU datacenter technology had grown old and unreliable, jeopardizing the school’s ability to innovate and perform its teaching mission.

SolutionFAMU used its existing Microsoft license to virtualize its datacenter with the Hyper-V technology in Windows Server 2008 R2, deploy Microsoft System Center 2012, and move student email into the cloud using Microsoft Office 365 for education.

Benefits Significantly reduce IT costs Improve technology reliability Provide platform for innovation Attract top students

“We increased our service with the people and HP servers we had by using Microsoft software and virtualization. With this solution, we saved our state-sponsored university several thousand dollars.”

Ronald Henry, Director of EIT Services and Telecommunications, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University

After years of enduring a lackluster economy and multiple budget cuts, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) found itself with outdated, unreliable technology. The school partnered with DynTek Services, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to come up with a cost-effective way to move forward. FAMU used its existing Microsoft license to virtualize most of its datacenter using the Hyper-V technology in Windows Server 2008 R2 and to create a private cloud. It moved student email into the cloud using Microsoft Office 365 for education and deployed Microsoft System Center 2012 to manage the entire infrastructure. For a small investment, FAMU transformed its technology infrastructure, reestablished technology reliability, and saved a significant amount of money. The IT staff can now deliver new services that enhance teaching and learning and help attract top students.

SituationFlorida Agricultural and Mechanical University, commonly known as Florida A&M University or FAMU, was founded as the State Normal College for Colored Students, and on October 3, 1887, it began classes with 15 students and two instructors. Today, FAMU is a premier school among historically black colleges and universities. Prominently located on the highest hill in Florida’s capital city of Tallahassee, Florida A&M University remains the only historically black university in the 13-member State University System of Florida. Its 3,000 faculty and staff serve 11,000 students.

Along with nearly every other university in the United States, FAMU has struggled with funding in recent years due to a poor national economy and drop in donations and investments. At each round of budget cuts, technology was always on the chopping block. “While IT is critical to the university’s functioning, we’re still a cost center and a logical place to cut,” says Ronald E. Henry II, Director of Enterprise Information Technology Services and Telecommunications at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.

The IT department had to eliminate IT support positions from its main campus and remote locations such as satellite campuses, which prompted it to move remote servers into the main datacenter where they were easier to maintain. Henry’s team also worked to consolidate its server footprint to further reduce maintenance and upgrade costs. It ended up with about 250 servers—still a lot of hardware for the remaining two technicians to support.

Another consequence of budget cuts was postponement of technology updates. By 2012, FAMU was running Microsoft Exchange Server 2003—an older email messaging program—on nine-year-old servers. Other applications were equally out-of-date. “We were getting hit hard with reliability problems, which gave the IT

department a black eye with the campus community,” Henry says. “Because all of our user credentials passed through Exchange, students and staff were locked out of other applications as well as their email when Exchange was down. Many departments kept their servers in their own offices because they didn’t trust us with their applications.” The IT staff used a number of older tools to manage its infrastructure and had poor visibility into system performance. They usually became aware that there was a problem only when something broke.

The university knew that a modern technology foundation was critical to keeping the university running smoothly, supporting faculty research and collaboration, enabling technology-based interaction between faculty and students, running current software, and attracting top students. It just needed to figure out how to gain and maintain that modern infrastructure on a tight budget.

SolutionHenry had several options. He knew that server virtualization was a logical way to reduce datacenter costs. He was also interested in moving student and alumni email—11,000-plus mailboxes—into the cloud to relieve his staff of caring for that service and the associated infrastructure. (The school needed to keep faculty and staff email messaging on-premises for regulatory reasons.) The question was which virtualization and cloud platforms to use?

Virtualize with Microsoft: A Logical StepFAMU engaged DynTek Services, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network and Microsoft National Systems Integrator, for assistance in understanding all of its options and getting the most for its money. As a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, DynTek has Gold competencies in Messaging, Management and Virtualization, Server Platform, and Communications. “DynTek had far more experience than we did because they dealt

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“We were getting hit hard with reliability problems, which gave the IT department a black eye with the campus community.”

Ronald Henry, Director, EIT Services and Telecommunications, Florida Agricultural

and Mechanical University

with the latest technology every day and also worked with many different customers, especially in the private sector,” Henry says. “By working with them, we could take advantage of their knowledge of both private-industry and education best practices.”

The two big virtualization providers were Microsoft and VMware. Because most of the FAMU infrastructure ran the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system and its staff was very familiar with Windows technology, FAMU leaned toward Microsoft. Henry didn’t want to force his already-overworked team to learn a whole new platform.

The university had other reasons for choosing Microsoft. “Cost was a huge consideration since we were budget constrained,” Henry says. “I wanted to give my chief financial officer and chief information officer something to smile about. VMware costs a lot more than Hyper-V and is not a good solution if you’re trying to cut costs.” The university already owned the licenses for the Hyper-V virtualization technology in Windows Server 2008 R2 and for Microsoft System Center 2012, the Microsoft datacenter management platform, through its Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.

FAMU also felt that Microsoft had a great cloud story. Its public-cloud email solution for universities, Microsoft Office 365 for education, is a cloud-based service that unites familiar Microsoft Office applications with the power of Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Lync Online into one connected, online solution. Licensing for this service, too, was already provided in FAMU’s Microsoft license.

The final checkbox in the Microsoft column was System Center 2012. This management suite would give the FAMU IT staff a single, centralized console for managing every aspect of its IT infrastructure—on-premises

and in the cloud. “This comprehensive management infrastructure was something that no other vendor provided,” says Ion Gott, Practice Director at DynTek. “Management efficiencies were very important for FAMU because of its staffing constraints.”

Reconfigure Datacenter as Private Cloud DynTek recommended that FAMU use Hyper-V to create a private cloud—a configuration of virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources that can be dynamically reconfigured on demand to meet changing needs. By configuring its datacenter as a private cloud, FAMU was able to move away from dedicating physical servers to specific applications and instead create an IT “fabric” or utility that would automatically and flexibly allocate compute and memory resources to workloads as needed.

After pulling most of its remote servers into its main datacenter, FAMU had extra servers on hand to create the private cloud hardware foundation. FAMU deployed Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter on a total of 16 host servers (HP ProLiant BL460c G6 and G7 blade servers) and deployed an HP EVA 8000 storage area network as cloud storage. FAMU exclusively uses HP datacenter hardware because of its reliability, performance, and energy efficiency. FAMU currently has hundreds of virtual machines running in its private cloud, with capacity to create many more.

FAMU is in the process of migrating many university applications to its private cloud. This includes its messaging system, database servers, security software, domain structure, and many departmental applications. Henry also plans to virtualize many lab and desktop computers around campus. A virtual desktop is a desktop computer image stored on a server and delivered to a low-cost thin-client device over a local network connection or the Internet.

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"Cost was a huge consideration since we were budget constrained. I wanted to give my chief financial officer and chief information officer something to smile about.”

Ronald Henry, Director of EIT Services and Telecommunications, Florida

Agricultural and Mechanical University

The university is also laying plans to upgrade its private cloud host servers to the Windows Server 2012 operating system, which is designed for cloud computing and delivers higher virtualization density and more robust scalability and reliability through various features. “We want to stay abreast of technology and not fall so far behind again,” Henry says. “Technology changes so quickly, and with our Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, we can more easily keep our technology up-to-date.”

At the same time that FAMU configured its private cloud, it also upgraded its Active Directory Domain Services in Windows Server 2008 R2, upgraded to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, deployed Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, and began to migrate student mailboxes to Office 365 for education and faculty and staff mailboxes to Exchange Server 2010—all with DynTek’s help. DynTek brought in the necessary Microsoft technical resources to answer questions. It also designed and implemented the Exchange Server and SharePoint Server deployments and orchestrated the migration of student mailboxes to Office 365 for education.

“I am well pleased with the relationship we have built with Dyntek, the efficiencies they have brought to our IT operation, and the well-coordinated efforts engineered by Mr. Ronald Henry and his team. These solutions have greatly benefited our IT operation,” says Michael A. James, Interim Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.

Manage All IT Assets from a Single ConsoleWith System Center 2012, FAMU has a single console for managing its entire IT infrastructure—its internal private cloud and its public-cloud student email environment. The staff uses System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager as its single portal for viewing and managing every

element in the private-cloud fabric—compute, storage, and network—and to adjust resources to maintain high availability.

The staff uses the Operations Manager component of System Center 2012 to monitor the health of all servers, applications, and network devices in its datacenter and also the on-premises components that connect to Office 365. “Previously, we struggled to get visibility into our environment,” says Lawanda Warren, Server Administrator at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. “Operations Manager gives us deep, proactive monitoring and root-cause analysis of problems so that we can be proactive versus reactive. We can stay ahead of outages and have a single ‘pane of glass’ to monitor everything in our private cloud. We can provision IT resources easily and monitor and manage them from one screen. It’s an incredibly powerful tool.”

Next, the team plans to deploy additional System Center components for workflow orchestration, service management, desktop security and management, and more. “The possibilities for expanding our cloud are endless,” Henry says. “System Center makes the management of our environment so much easier. For our staff, moving from the old command-line interface to the graphical interface of System Center is like moving from a Model-T to a spaceship.”

BenefitsBy working with DynTek and using Microsoft private cloud software, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University has been able to reduce IT costs, modernize its datacenter, quickly deploy needed applications, and improve technology reliability. With a modern datacenter, the school can keep up with technology advances that support better teaching and learning and attract technology-savvy students.

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“I am well pleased with the relationship we have built with Dyntek, the efficiencies they have brought to our IT operation, and the well-coordinated efforts engineered by Mr. Ronald Henry and his team. These solutions have greatly benefited our IT operation.”

Michael A. James, Interim Vice President of Information Technology and Chief

Information Officer, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University

Significantly Reduce IT CostsIn configuring its datacenter as a highly virtualized private cloud, FAMU consolidated dozens of physical servers to just 16, eliminating the need to constantly refresh servers every five years or so—a hardware savings of up to US$400,000 each refresh cycle. But when you add in power, cooling and maintenance savings for this many servers, the savings increase substantially.

IT management efficiencies are a big part of the savings. “Over the past three to four years, I’ve lost three server technicians to layoffs and attrition,” Henry says. “Our limited IT resources made it increasingly difficult to deliver the quality of service that our students and faculty demanded. We increased our service with the people and HP servers we had by using Microsoft software and virtualization. With this solution, we saved our state-sponsored university several thousand dollars.” Improve Reliability of Campus Technology, Increase TrustThe FAMU IT staff has dramatically improved the reliability of email and other applications by moving them onto a modern foundation. “We didn’t measure outages before,“ Henry says. “My reliability measure was the feedback I got when I sat in meetings and listened to staff and students complain: ‘My mailbox is too small, I can’t log on, email is down.’ These complaints are decreasing. We haven’t seen downtime. The feeling across campus is that IT has gotten a lot better. Users never say thank you when their email works. They only call when they have a problem. If my phone does not ring, I’m happy.”

The improved performance and reliability of the IT infrastructure is also persuading university departments to entrust the IT department with their servers and applications. “It ultimately serves the university better to have all technology cared for in one place, according to industry best practices,” Henry says. “Over

the past few months, we’ve moved several departmental servers into the datacenter as virtual machines. In fact, departments are shocked at how quickly we can deliver new servers to them—in one day versus the four weeks it previously took to requisition and configure a physical server. IT has become so responsive that departments have started to look around for what else they can bring into our infrastructure.”

Give University a Platform for InnovationThis leads to the next benefit of a private cloud infrastructure: the ability to quickly respond to university needs. IT is no longer a roadblock to innovation. If an academic department needs new software for a class, IT can deploy it instantly. If another department drops a class and no longer needs a server, the IT staff can reclaim that compute resource in its cloud and instantly put it to work on other workloads. If the university decides to embrace a new technology such as tablet computers or expand its Wi-Fi capabilities on campus, the IT staff has a flexible datacenter foundation that can accommodate the need.

“With our previous infrastructure, we were limited by how many servers we had on hand and by the CPU and storage in individual servers,” says Warren. “But with blade servers and a private cloud configuration, compute and storage resources are easy to expand and reconfigure. We never run into physical resource constraints anymore, which lets us say yes rather than no when users come to us with requests. Our Microsoft private cloud has been a huge game changer for us in terms of how responsive we can be to the university.”

Attract Top Students and Improve Teaching and Learning

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“Our Microsoft private cloud has been a huge game changer for us in terms of how responsive we can be to the university.”

Lawanda Warren, Server Administrator, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical

University

With technology becoming increasingly important in education and high school students arriving on campus with high levels of technology fluency, it’s critical that FAMU be able to meet student and staff expectations. Now it can. “The students that we are recruiting are very technology savvy,” Henry says. “Today, when we go to recruiting events, we have a better, more compelling story to tell. We have the latest wireless technologies, smartphone support, modern email, and other services that students expect. We can give our faculty the latest technology such as SharePoint that they can use to collaborate with one another and with students. Thanks to Microsoft and DynTek, we have a technology infrastructure that is as sophisticated as any other university’s out there—something I never would have imagined possible just two years ago.”

Transform the datacenterThe hybrid cloud from Microsoft transforms the datacenter by extending existing investments in skills and technology with public cloud services and a common set of management tools. With an on-premises infrastructure connected to the Windows Azure platform, you can deliver services faster and scale up or down quickly to meet changing needs.

For more information about transforming the datacenter, go to:www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/cloud-os/modern-data-center.aspx

77Er ro r : Re ference source not foundThis case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published February 2014

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter− Microsoft System Center 2012

Microsoft Office 365 for education− Microsoft Exchange Online− Microsoft Lync Online− Microsoft SharePoint Online

Technologies− Hyper-V

Hardware HP ProLiant BL460c G6 and BL 460c G7

blade servers HP EVA 8000 storage area network

Partners DynTek Services

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about DynTek Services products and services, call (949) 271-6700 or visit the website at: www.dyntek.com

For more information about Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, visit the website at: www.famu.edu