Lone Star College System Transforms IT with EMC to Drive Classroom Innovation and Improve Quality of Education

HOPKINTON, Mass., June 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that Lone Star College System, the fastest growing community college system in Texas, has transformed its IT infrastructure with EMC^® VMAX^® 10K storage and EMC Avamar^®, EMC NetWorker^® and EMC RecoverPoint™.   The college system also uses VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies for its 97% virtualized infrastructure.   As part of its transformation, Lone Star has realigned its IT organization and processes to better support the college system's strategic objectives by providing faster, more reliable access to next-generation classroom technologies.  By leveraging Private, Public and Hybrid Clouds for their core infrastructure with help from EMC Global Services, Lone Star achieved enterprise agility, enhanced flexibility, and increased performance.

Customer Benefits:

• Improved Agility—Lone Star has reduced the time to deliver new services to its internal clients from months to just 2-3 days, enabling enhanced learning opportunities in the classroom.
• Increased Efficiency—Lone Star has tripled their storage capacity, while at the same time they reduced the time it spends on storage administration by 20%, enabling its IT staff to collaborate more closely with campus leadership to identify new IT solutions that meet the college system's strategic objectives of improved student learning.
• Top Performance—With increased agility, Lone Star has helped its nursing program, among others, achieve a 100% pass rate on qualifying exams as a result of the state-of-the-art technologies, such as life-like infant simulators, that Lone Star was able to deploy.

Customer Challenges and Solution

In just three years, Lone Star saw its student population surge from 63,000 to more than 85,000 as the need for a degree in a tough economy and critical workforce training was necessary to compete. As a result, demands of a larger student population were straining performance and reliability of its IT infrastructure. Registration processing would slow down and even halt during peak periods. Delivery of IT resources to support new classes, instructional applications, fundraising systems and other critical systems required weeks or even months of lead time. In addition, Lone Star was seeing increasing demands from the community to offer new courses on technologies and skill sets, such as Oracle databases, that require additional flexibility and scalability. 

By consolidating its infrastructure onto the highly trusted, smart and efficient VMAX 10K, Lone Star has dramatically improved its ability to provide students with the latest educational technologies and tools, respond more quickly to the needs of local employers, and increase overall efficiency and reliability of operational systems.  To enhance data availability, Lone Star has implemented EMC Avamar, EMC NetWorker and EMC RecoverPoint.

Customer Quotes:

Link Alander, Chief Information Officer, Lone Star College System

Transforming our Business

"Our job is to make sure our IT infrastructure is available around-the-clock. Students need to be able to work at anytime of the day or night to facilitate their learning. The end product is having students graduate, become successful, and improve their lives. Anytime IT can support that instructional mission of the college system, we're doing the right thing."

"We have transformed the way we operate, looking at the value of the business more than the nuts and bolts of IT.  We ask ourselves, 'how do we reduce risk, enable the strategic initiatives of the college system, and provide a new level of service that our users are demanding?' That is the evolution.  Any IT department that can help their companies or organizations succeed needs to focus on providing IT-as-a-Service to its clients."