Westchester Community College Scales Up with Unisys ES7000 Server
By Elizabeth Lipp

As Corporate CIOs struggle to streamline their data centers and maintain cost-effective technology infrastructures, IT decision-makers in the educational community are facing similar challenges. Nowhere in the educational arena is the pressure to do more with less more prevalent than at the community college level. Unisys reports that a large number of community colleges have turned to the ES7000 server to streamline their data centers.
"I'd like to say that this is a grand plan of ours that's coming to fruition," noted John Keller, senior manager for ES7000 platforms at Unisys, to 5 Minute Briefing in a private interview. "But these colleges have come to us on their own. We all agree that IT is the core that keeps us going. But costs of IT are growing, and this is a means of cost containment."
One such college is Westchester Community College (WCC), based in Valhalla, NY. As the largest college in the county, it was experiencing some growing pains. After undergoing an audit by the Commission on Secondary Schools of the Middle States Association (CSS-MSA), a higher education accreditation body, Westchester Community College was advised to bring its IT system in-house.

"We needed a server that could deliver the highest levels of performance for our complex technical infrastructure and grow over time with our expanding student body," said Anthony Scordino, manager, Network Services for WCC. "The ES7000 was our one-stop shopping - it contains the performance, availability and scalability required to meet the needs of our students, faculty and staff. By scaling up and standardizing on Windows, we're able to reduce our administration costs, and provide the school and its students with quick, efficient access to resources and tools on a daily basis."

With limited physical space available, WCC chose the Unisys ES7000 server to scale up rather than scale out, resulting in easier manageability for the local college and its small IT staff. The power of the two ES7000 540 servers will consolidate the workload of legacy proprietary systems, provided by the county, to create a scalable, more streamlined environment.

In addition to consolidation, the ES7000 will also allow the school to manage a variety of applications from a single source, including PeopleSoft 8.8 Financial and Human Resources applications. Through the implementation of PeopleSoft, WCC is able to oversee and regulate many of the school's daily functions such as finance, human resources, student administration, student registration and student transcripts. In 2005, the college plans to migrate its student administration and financial aid systems to PeopleSoft 8.9 and consolidate all major business applications onto the ES7000.

In selecting a service provider, WCC compared the products offered by Oracle and Unisys. Ultimately, Unisys became the clear choice with its advantages lying in the flexibility and expandability of the ES7000 architecture. In addition, WCC's existing familiarity with SQL/Windows offered ease of transition and minimized the necessity for training if they had chosen a Unix/Risc-based environment instead.

The ES7000s will operate in a clustered environment with components of different applications running on each other. One 8-way partition will be used as a development environment. WCC also implemented Unisys Server Sentinel management software to exercise increased control over its infrastructure and monitor network activity.

"We're very happy," Scordino added. "The implementation went through with minimal hang-ups and hitches."

"Westchester Community College is one of a growing number of organizations that are realizing that scale up technology has lower total cost of ownership than a large number of disparate servers," Unisys' Keller added. "The bottom line is about reducing total cost, and a lot of these college installs are reducing TCO by over 30 percent. That's a big, measurable difference."