VMware and BlueLock Deliver Cloud Infrastructure for SMB Customer Marian College
Internal Cloud Built on VMware Platform Enables Marian College to Save Money and Improve System Availability and Disaster Preparedness
PALO ALTO, Calif. – February 18, 2009– VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced it has teamed with BlueLock, a VMware VIP Enterprise partner and a member of the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) to provide infrastructure for Marian College. Together they built an internal cloud, which helped the school reduce its IT cost structure while improving the reliability and performance of its IT services.
Founded in 1851, Marian College, located in Indianapolis serves a student population of more than 2100 students. The school approached BlueLock to help modernize an antiquated IT infrastructure and implement the school’s first-ever comprehensive disaster-recovery strategy. BlueLock developed a solution called the ‘BlueLock Box’ based on VMware’s industry-leading virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure 3. The solution enabled Marian College to consolidate 15 distributed servers at two locations onto a single rack. The BlueLock Box solution pools Marian’s IT resources into a private cloud and allocates resources as needed to optimize application performance.
“BlueLock and VMware have given us the ability to consolidate and virtualize our infrastructure, which reduces costs, improves manageability and helps ensure high availability,” said Mike Temaat, network engineer at Marian College. “And our internal cloud connects seamlessly to BlueLock’s external cloud, which allows us to simply ‘turn on’ disaster recovery by backing up our data to BlueLock’s remote datacenters. As a fairly small organization, we thought true disaster recovery was out of our price range. BlueLock and VMware made it possible.”
BlueLock estimates implementation of the cloud-based Marian College disaster recovery solution cost roughly 35 percent of what a pure hardware-based approach would cost. In addition, the virtualized environment, including a campus-wide Microsoft Exchange implementation, provides greater operational flexibility and is much easier to manage because fewer physical servers are required.
“With VMotion technology, we can move a virtual machine from one blade to another, take a blade down for maintenance, restart storage, and update servers quickly and easily without missing a beat,” said Temaat. “It has been an amazing change. It has enabled us to increase productivity and keep systems up to date with less pain. Going virtual allows us to achieve our IT objectives much faster than we ever anticipated.”
John Qualls, president of BlueLock, observed, “The solution we designed and implemented for Marian College demonstrates the real value of virtualization. VMware software helps us find innovative and affordable solutions to big problems. SMB customers like Marian College can implement IT services -which were previously out of their reach financially. VMware says it helps customers do more with less. The BlueLock Box is proof of that.” For more information about BlueLock, please visit www.bluelock.com.
About VMware
VMware (NYSE: VMW) is the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter. Customers of all sizes rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2008 revenues of $1.9 billion, more than 130,000 customers and more than 22,000 partners, VMware is one of the fastest growing public software companies. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is majority-owned by EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC). For more information, visit www.vmware.com.
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