University of Delaware

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The University’s IT department provides invaluable services with applications that manage human resources, payroll, student records and grant applications, campus e-mail and directory, calendaring, Web presence, and the University portal. To ensure the highest application performance and scalability, the University turned to Sun for an IT infrastructure that manages 80% of the administrative applications. “Our success depends on a high level of performance, availability, and security to ensure successful application deployment,” says Daniel Grim, executive director of IT at the University of Delaware. “Sun has consistently proven to be a partner we can count on.”

With Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), the University’s IT department can reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot problems. “This level of visibility has been unavailable until now,” explains Grim. “Rather than days or weeks, DTrace has helped us to now diagnose, analyze, and resolve system problems within hours, with no disruption in service.” And with Solaris Containers, the department virtually eliminate system-wide crashes by partitioning a single Solaris system instance into an isolated application environment, separately administered and running an independent set of applications — and eliminating the need to spend thousands of dollars per machine.

With its increased identity security, as well as the benefits of an enterprise firewall provided by a new IP filtering feature, Solaris 10 offers key technologies designed to help protect the University’s systems from internal and external attacks. As a result, the IT department has never had an application compromised while running on a Solaris machine. “We have found that the Sun Solaris Operating System is much more secure than comparable Windows-based servers,” notes Grim. “Sun’s commitment to education helps us meet our technology goals and has maintained our allegiance to our Sun infrastructure.”