The George Washington University

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GWU’s IT infrastructure is essential for the university’s operation. The IT staff manages two data centers and a network as large as that of an Internet service provider. It also maintains several mission-critical online business applications that enable faculty, students, administrators and parents to perform the activities that make GWU an outstanding academic institution. The IT environment had grown at a phenomenal rate, but was plagued with significant flaws and inefficiencies. If a disaster occurred, it would have taken days to recover the data and resume operations, leading to massive productivity losses and leaving a window for potentially dangerous security breaches.

Clustered Sun servers offer faster and more comprehensive disaster recovery, and the dynamic configuration capabilities give developers the needed flexibility to allocate compute resources on the fly, saving hard dollars and productivity. “The Sun Java Enterprise System components are so well integrated that they gave us a simple and reliable software infrastructure system to support all our CES applications,” says Bret Jones, Director of Technology Engineering for GWU. “And with Sun Services, we know we can call somebody to get immediate help if anything goes wrong.”

GWU decided to develop a business continuity plan to fully protect its data assets and reduce its liabilities. “Essentially we changed from a reactive disaster recovery plan to a strategically designed business continuity plan,” explains Ron Bonig, Executive Director of Technology Operations for GWU. “Sun Services and the Sun servers and tape backup gave us the ability to provide a flexible compute environment and instant failover, hence our confidence to manage change with ease.”

In summary, Sun helped GWU implement a flexible and cost-effective data center architecture that met its requirement for business continuity, reliability, availability and manageability.