College gains fast, reliable IT without boosting expensesMcHenry County College supports its students and faculty with faster access, greater security, and improved backup and disaster recovery capabilities

Customer profile

Company McHenry County

College

Industry Higher Education

Country United States

Employees 748 (11,500 students)

Website mchenry.edu

“In technology, everyone has promises to make in their stories, and when you hear so many promises, you can become cynical. When we heard Dell and Avalon’s story, I thought, ‘We’ll believe it when we see it.’ But now we have seen it. And it turned out promises were kept and it is a story with a happy ending.” Dr. Allen Butler, Chief Information Officer, McHenry County College

Business needMcHenry County College (MCC) of

Crystal Lake, IL, wanted to quickly and

cost-effectively improve its desktop

virtualization, computing storage,

security and disaster recovery plans.

SolutionWith the help of Avalon Technologies,

MCC deployed Dell and Intel® server,

storage and firewall solutions to

increase performance and storage

while enhancing security.

Benefits• Supports the demand for greater

online access and collaboration for

students and teachers

• Meets the college’s need for a cost-

effective disaster recovery solution

• Saves more than $400,000 in data

management costs

• Increases protection against

computer viruses and malware

attacks

• Saves over $150,000 in storage

hardware replacement costs

Solutions at a glance• Cloud Client-Computing• Desktop Virtualization• Network Security• Storage

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“A Dell Storage SC4020 array with Live Volume was able to take the place of five various storage area network shelves of disks, which would have cost between $30,000 and $50,000 each to replace.” Rob Rasmussen, Director of Infrastructure Operations, McHenry County College

McHenry County College (MCC), a comprehensive community college based in Crystal Lake, Illinois, is fighting against this rising tide of costs. Its challenge was to offer the best education to its students at a reasonable price while making sure the college had the IT infrastructure needed to support its data resources securely, inexpensively and with solid redundancy. That’s what inspired Dr. Allen Butler, MCC’s chief information officer, to develop a new technology master plan when he took over his new position at the college in 2011.

Dr. Butler’s ambitious plan laid out four ultimate goals for revamping MCC’s IT infrastructure: create anywhere, anytime access to information; improve cost and flexibility through desktop virtualization; create better business continuity by improving and automating systems and processes; and implement a high-quality enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The core of this plan was to rebuild the college’s outdated ERP system. “ERP is at the heart of things that needed to be solidified and stabilized,” Dr. Butler recalls. “We needed good backup and restoration capabilities, and the ability to access that environment on or off campus.”

Meeting its goals with a trusted vendorOperating on a limited budget with few IT personnel in place to manage complex or disparate systems for the college, Dr. Butler and his team had their work cut out for them. MCC, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year, serves 11,500 students annually. With

the support of the community college’s administration and its Board of Trustees, Dr. Butler and his team invited vendors to bid on MCC’s technology overhaul, which incorporated improvements in its desktop virtualization, ERP and disaster recovery. Dell and integration partner Avalon Technologies were the clear winners.

MCC had already been using Dell hardware in its PC environment for more than a decade, leasing Dell laptops and servers. “McHenry County College was satisfied with Dell’s services, products and abilities,” says Butler. “And we felt we could do more together.” The college also had previous experience with Avalon Technologies, a Dell Premier Partner whose expertise in data center design and migration services generates efficiencies in performance and cost.

Education is perhaps the biggest differentiator of success in this

country. Unfortunately, the cost of college is growing at a more

rapid clip than ever before.

Products & Services

Hardware

Dell Storage SC4020 array with Live Volume powered by Intel® Xeon® Processors

Dell SonicWALL NSA 4600 next-generation firewalls

Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis

Dell PowerEdge M630 and M620 servers

Dell Wyse 3010 thin clients

Dell Networking MXL switches

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A Wyse decision saves time and money Dr. Butler and Geary Smith, MCC’s director of Technology Support Services, decided that rather than simply swap out the 680 desktop computers the school was leasing for newer models, they would start incorporating desktop virtualization. That is, they would replace outmoded “fat clients” with thin clients and thus also support the school’s increasing move toward a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy. To meet these goals, they deployed Dell Wyse thin clients.

Smith says, “There has been increased growth in the need for more devices. But with the virtualization on the client side by using Dell Wyse thin clients, we are getting that growth but not having to turn around 1,000 PCs in a year. And with virtualization in place, we can be more flexible and meet needs much more quickly, especially at our off-campus business training center.”

The deployment process went well and the college has realized significant savings. Dr. Butler says, “By working with Dell and Avalon to compare options, we were able to find the right solution at the right price. An internal assessment showed that MCC will save about $400,000 over five years as a direct result of deploying the Dell Wyse thin clients.”

Gaining reliable backup and fast recoveryDisaster recovery was another essential need for the community college, which previously had little in the way of reliable, accessible backup for its data. MCC was set to replace its existing storage, which had completed its life cycle. With Avalon’s support, the IT team looked to Dell Storage SC4020 arrays powered by Intel® Xeon® Processors with Live Volume for data replication and storage, according to Rob Rasmussen, MCC’s director of Infrastructure Operations. Live Volume auto-tiering allows better flexibility and performance by promoting or demoting data across various tiers of

storage based on the needs at the time.

The solution fit the bill for offering almost instantaneous recovery and live replication, so the college could establish a redundant disaster recovery backup at Shah Center, its business training center, which is nine miles from the main campus.

In fact, Rasmussen says that thanks to Dell Storage SC series with Live Volume the college’s recovery point objective (the point at which data might be lost due to a system incident) is now down to zero. The new storage infrastructure has proved intelligent enough to manage block-level changes as they occur, rather than simply running a complete backup of all files. “We’re limited in the amount of bandwidth we have in our point-to-point connection to the Shah Center,” he says. “Having a system in place that has the sense to make only block-level changes makes connectivity more cost-efficient, while keeping us much more current than before.”

Realizing high performance, storage savings and improved network security McHenry County College’s ability to set up its Dell storage infrastructure using a hybrid array of spinning disks and MLC and SLC flash drives was also a big selling point. The IT professionals knew they would be able to reach their business objectives with a high level of performance. “This infrastructure allows the SAN to use the speed it needs, when it needs it,” says Rasmussen. “Being able to auto-tier is awesome. And the hybrid array gives us the ability to use the IOPS as we need it. So, on registration days, when the college computer system is hit hard, we can still offer constant access.”

The efficiency and horsepower of the Storage SC series hardware has driven cost savings on the storage side as well. Switching from their previous arrangement of five different storage area network shelves of disks to just one Dell Storage SC4020 array with Live

“By working with Dell and Avalon to compare options, we were able to find the right solution at the right price. An internal assessment showed that MCC will save about $400,000 over five years as a direct result of deploying the Dell Wyse thin clients.” Dr. Allen Butler, Chief Information Officer, McHenry County College

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Volume enabled MCC to save between $150,000 and $250,000. Rasmussen says, “A Dell Storage SC4020 array with Live Volume was able to take the place of five various storage area network shelves of disks, which would have cost between $30,000 and $50,000 each to replace.”

Avoiding disasterIn outfitting its disaster recovery site, MCC also enlisted the use of a Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis and Dell Networking MXL switches to mirror what the community college had running at its main campus. MCC also deployed PowerEdge M620 and M630 blade servers powered by Intel® Xeon® Processors at the Shah Center, rather than opting to use cloud storage. Dr. Butler says, “We found that delivering a comparable capability we have here on-site instead via the cloud would be much more expensive,” adding that MCC’s more advanced disaster recovery affords the college more capacity, more horsepower and greater access.

With the help of Avalon, MCC’s IT team also decided to use two Dell SonicWALL NSA 4600 firewalls at its Shah Center disaster recovery site as the cornerstone of the site’s total network security solution, rather than use the same firewall technology it had previously enlisted at the main campus. Even at a backup site, cyberattacks and malicious code are growing concerns for colleges, where students are often tempted to download illegal software or code, and there is often the threat of viruses. Rasmussen says, “We wanted to improve network security, and we found that SonicWALL had the malware protection we needed, and it was economical.”

Nassir Jamal, chief technology officer at Avalon Technologies, says that looking at Dell SonicWALL to protect the college’s disaster recovery site was a natural fit with the rest of the Dell solution in place. “It was not a separate element; we were looking at it in a holistic sense,” he says. “It made integration much easier with the rest of the solution at the site.”

A good ending to the storyEven with all the moving parts to this technology plan, MCC’s deployment — including testing, system migrations and all the requisite tweaking — was completed in less than eight weeks. As a result, Dr. Butler says that MCC has made huge strides in reliability, access, redundancy and security, without having to add anyone to the college’s IT staff. Smith says that working with Dell and Avalon Technologies has given MCC the kind of IT partnership that it had lacked in relationships with other vendors. “It was a very smooth process, with no downtime,” Smith says. “We really were pleasantly surprised.”

“In technology, everyone has promises to make in their stories, and when you hear so many promises, you can become cynical,” says Dr. Butler. “When we heard Dell and Avalon’s story, I thought, ‘We’ll believe it when we see it.’ But now we have seen it. And it turned out promises were kept and it is a story with a happy ending.”

Dell, the Dell logo, PowerEdge, SonicWALL and Wyse are trademarks of Dell Inc. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon Inside are trademarks and registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. Availability and terms of Dell Software, Solutions and Services vary by region. This case study is for informational purposes only. Dell makes no warranties — expressed or implied — in this case study. Reference Number: 10022809 © July 2016, Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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