Western Governors University

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Western Governors University (WGU) combines fully accredited academic standards with the convenience of online access, enabling 11,000 students around the world to receive a high-quality education. In 2006, as it was moving its datacenter from Silicon Valley to Salt Lake City, WGU decided to upgrade its IT infrastructure. The university sought to provide wide-ranging services to students and support rapid growth while minimizing IT costs and conserving datacenter space.

“Our perspective was the IT department had already consumed all the datacenter space it should ever need, even though we need to scale by 20–25% per year,” says Dave Wilson, chief technology officer at Western Governors University. After evaluating several products, the university chose to deploy Sun Blade technologies to support critical applications that run on different operating systems and processor types.

Specifically, WGU selected two Sun Blade 6000 Chassis (one as primary and one as backup), each with three Sun Blade T6320, one Sun Blade X6220, and one Sun Blade X6250 server modules. The T6320 modules support Jive Clearspace community and collaboration technology (online student forums) running on the Solaris 10 Operating System. The X6220 modules, based on the dual-core AMD Operton processor, support a student handbook and knowledge base running on Windows Server 2003. The X6250 modules, with a quad-core Intel Xeon processor, support the university’s CRM application by Talisma, along with SQL Server, running on guest Windows Sever 2003 operating systems with VMware ESX as the host. “The ability to run multiple server modules in the same chassis gives us the flexibility to choose the right processor-based compute module for the job,” Wilson commented. “That's a significant benefit.”

To maintain high reliability in its tiered environment, WGU uses Oracle DataGuard for the database tier and F5’s BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager for the Web front end. Virtualization through Solaris Containers technology and VMware ESX provides redundancy for higher availability and reduces the need for adding more physical servers. Wilson is particularly impressed with Solaris Containers: “Virtualization is fundamental for keeping our footprint small, and working with virtualization technology in Solaris 10 has been wonderful. It’s very flexible, and while I’ve been here nothing running on it has ever broken.”

This reliability is reflected on the hardware side of the Sun platform as well. “Our availability target is four nines — 99.99%,” says Wilson. “However, the Sun Blade hardware’s availability has actually been 100% — zero failures. That’s rock-solid reliability. These things just don’t break.”

The solution’s performance has also exceeded the university’s expectations, helping to save costs by handling more users and more demanding loads without additional servers. “Our Jive Clearspace community technology, operating on four Sun virtual machines, rarely exceeded 3–5% processor utilization,” says Wilson. “With that kind of excess system resources, we realized we could save $30,000 a year in licenses by cutting back the number of virtual machines. Even with that change, we still don’t expect to see more than 10% peak utilization.”

Additionally, Wilson is impressed with the technical and consulting expertise that Sun representatives have demonstrated. “We have responsive SunSpectrum support when we need it, but we rarely do. When we start a project, we can always turn to Sun for guidance. We don’t get a sales pitch on replacing equipment but rather advice on how to make the most of the Sun technology we have. They’re great partners for long-term IT planning.” WGU may soon take advantage of that planning as it considers deploying Sun identity management technology and evaluating Sun Blade 6400–series servers.

Wilson concludes, “It’s amazing that one Blade 6000 Chassis can run the Solaris 10 Operating System, including multiple virtualized instances, VMware ESX, and Windows Server 2003, all literally within millimeters of each other. And it all works just great!”