The Mississippi Community College Board (MCCB) is using new technology infrastructure to improve virtual learning. Deployment of the FlashStack converged infrastructure from Pure Storage and Cisco is enhancing MCCB’s data center infrastructure, reducing costs, and drastically improving enrollment experience and opportunities for its more than 70,000 students.
The Tech Decision
The MCCB provides centralized IT services for its 15 community colleges and acts as an Internet service provider for those campuses. The IT team develops and deploys key applications such as student enrollment, and collects data across the system in response to legislative requests.
Initial discussions focused on upgrading to FlashStack to improve enrollment processes for MCCB’s virtual community college system. Technology expectations included having the 15 colleges within MCCB share courses, expanding cross-district enrollment.
The Solution
FlashStack combines the latest in compute, network and storage into a single, integrated architecture. Based on Cisco Validated Designs and joint reference architectures, these pre-tested configurations speed time to deployment, lower overall IT costs and reduce deployment risk.
FlashStack has the ability to scale, without disruption, from small (2 hosts and 5.5 terabytes [TB] of storage) to very large (more than 160 hosts and more than 1.5 petabytes [PB] storage). As it scales, it keeps the same number of points of management and same resilient, redundant design, so not only do applications stay online, but they are easier to monitor and maintain.
Integrating FlashStack helps meet stringent service-level agreements (SLAs) while reducing hardware and software costs, mitigating deployment risk, and reducing complexity.
The Impact
The impact of the FlashStack converged infrastructure has been seen most notably in the process of registering students for classes, using the online Enrollment Tool.
Traditionally, students and administrators would encounter problems with even accessing the system, heightened during the first week of registering for classes.After migrating the Enrollment Tool to the FlashStack infrastructure the speed in which students can register has drastically improved.
The virtual community college system has seen its greatest improvement now during the Fall 2017 college enrollment time-frame, with the FlashStack solution.
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