Last week, EMC has brought cloud service one step higher with VMware and VMAXe.  With this, EMC has again raised its bar with its latest development in educational system’s and program’s cloud service.

Lone Star College System is Texas’ fastest growing community college system, benefiting greatly from EMC’s cloud services.  It’s serving around 95k students and has an increasing demand for IT services in particular.  However, because of its old infrastructure, meeting and catering to demand has been a struggle.  It is in this light that Lone Star has felt the need to update their system, incorporating more  IT-as-a-service to its repertoire.

“ With our prior infrastructure, we were struggling to meet growing demand for IT services while dealing with frequent system outages.  An instructor only has 50 minutes of class time, and if the only lesson plan they’re using isn’t available, that valuable instruction period is lost.  As our infrastructures grew, it also was becoming more costly and time consuming to manage,“ says Link Alander, Lone Star College System’s associate vice chancellor of Technology Services.

With  the help of EMC as well as VMware, Lone Star’s aging infrastructure has been brought to a higher level,  providing a better  quality IT service and meeting the demands.

In addition, with the implementation of this cloud service, Lone Star’s savings in Capital expenditures for a period of one year has reached to $600,000.  Aside from this, a remarkable 66% of the energy consumption has been reduced.   To top it off, the college system has achieved improved availability for all critical applications, and has also increased business agility with faster turnaround IT service, from three to four months, down to less than a week.

“Without EMC and VMware, we couldn’t have achieved our transformation to the cloud and deliver IT-as-a-service,” said Link Alander, Lone Star’s Associate Vice Chancellor of Technology Services.

“The tight integration of VMware and EMC technologies combined with the expertise and support we get from EMC and VMware professional services have been critical to our adoption of cloud. We are now able to deliver new IT services to our students, faculty and staff in less than a week compared to three to four months as a result of our cloud transformation.” “Our private cloud allows us to meet the needs of the business and add strategic value to the organization,” added Lone Star Vice Chancellor and CIO Shah Ardalan.

Joining Lone Star in making cloud services as part of their educational program is the University of Utah, powered by HP Storage solutions in managing campus research programs.  UConn’s also looking to virtualized solutions, marking increasing support for cloud-based solutions from academia.