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Higher Education Institution in Need of Architecture Redesign to Support Network Growth
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Facility Management
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
As the college grew rapidly, expanding globally with additional students, its incumbent IT infrastructure suffered, unable to meet the challenges brought by this growth. St. Petersburg College needed an advanced Application Delivery Controller (ADC) with multi-tenancy features in order to manage the diverse and rapidly increasing plethora of applications, spanning from classroom campus-wide applications such as Blackboard Learn+ to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software such as Oracle PeopleSoft, in addition to Microsoft applications such as SharePoint, Lync and Exchange. St. Petersburg College’s major concern was to find a platform that could accommodate growth and significantly increase data center bandwidth. The solution needed to run efficiently and flawlessly, with no traffic impact during failover.
About The Customer
Established in 1927, St. Petersburg College is recognized as Florida’s first two-year institution of higher education. Currently, the college is a fully accredited multi-campus institution with campuses across St. Petersburg’s county spanning from Clearwater, Tarpon Springs, Pinellas Park, Largo, and Seminole. Over 63,000 students a year achieve their educational goals through St. Petersburg College, including students that reside in many countries across the globe. St. Petersburg College prides itself in decades of academic and community investment. Enrollment at St. Petersburg College has increased each year since 2000. And for the last four years consecutively, St. Petersburg College has been designated Florida’s leader in distance learning, ranking number one in both the number of courses offered and the number of students enrolled. Notable alumni include NASA astronauts Nicole Stott and Samuel Durrance; Bob Carroll, writer and creator of the celebrated “I Love Lucy” television show; and famed rock musician Jim Morrison of The Doors. St. Petersburg College’s network hosts approximately 3,000 staff and faculty members, in addition to the 32,000 students enrolled in online classes each semester alone.
The Solution
A10 was chosen over the incumbent vendor, F5 Networks, due to the flexibility of A10 ADCs. St. Petersburg College established the A10 ADC as a proven virtualization solution that could fulfill the requirements of high density and high performance while delivering on flexibility and reliability. A10 ADCs provide high-performance multi-tenancy functionality with faster client response times, while reducing the escalating costs of deploying ADCs utilizing Application Delivery Partitions (ADPs). Key differentiators A10 ADCs provided St. Petersburg College include flexible virtualization, superior high availability, enhanced performance, advanced SSL offload, usability advantages, and cost reduction. A10 ADCs’ scalable symmetrical multiprocessing (SSMP) architecture allows traffic to utilize multiple CPUs without latency or blocking; applications run exponentially faster, especially during peak usage times. A10 ADCs’ Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS®) defines a new generation of ADCs with greater performance, and the greatest performance per Watt (PPW), making A10 ADCs the most flexible, scalable, and energy-efficient solution on the market today.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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