In 1991 the Minnesota Legislature passed a law to merge the state’s community colleges, technical colleges, and universities. Effective in 1995 it became one system instead of three. Today the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) system is made up of 32 institutions (on 53 campuses in 46 communities), including 25 two-year colleges and 7 state universities. Students enroll in the individual colleges and universities, and a universal application form is accepted at all Minnesota state colleges and universities.

 

The MnSCU system is the sixth-largest system of two-year and four-year colleges and universities in the country, based on student enrollment. Currently the system serves 374,000 students each year in credit and noncredit courses, producing 33,500 graduates each year. During the 2005-06 academic years more than 42,000 students took online courses.

 

The Office of the Chancellor for MnSCU was faced with updating their current IT systems. These systems provided file, print, and messaging for some 300 users located within the Chancellors office. Each of these services was spread across separate physical hardware with the software being on multiple versions. Furthermore, over time the performance had declined and general perception was the systems and services were not keeping up with staff and organizational needs.

 

The environment needed to be updated; however, management did not want to add more independent servers. This approach created more management challenges because they wanted to add more services, such as desktop management, application packaging, and mobile messaging services, without adding more servers. There was also a need to update revisions to file, print, and messaging services to incorporate enhancements and increase performance.

 

The Solbrekk professional services team worked in concert with MnSCU business and technical management to develop a solution that would support current and future needs for the growing demand. Utilizing hardware from HP and software from VMware and Novell, the Solbrekk network engineer team implemented the solution outlined below.

 

The solution utilizes HP storage area network (SAN) technology and HP server technology. The solution also utilizes VMware ESX virtualization technology, which provides several key enhancements such as snapshot and v-motion to increase availability, performance, and management. The physical server count was reduced, while the virtual server count more than doubled. This provided server capacity to enhance current services like file and print and to implement new service to support workstation management and mobile messaging.

 

During the migrations to the virtual environment all services were moved to the Linux platform using Novell’s Open Enterprise Server (OES). Today all users access file and print services from these OES servers. The messaging service is GroupWise version 7.0, which facilitated the introduction of Novell’s Mobile Server. This supported access to the growing number of mobile devices for secure remote messaging access.

 

The Solbrekk network engineers also implemented Novell ZENworks version 7 to manage over 50 applications and provide inventory management of these systems.

 

Upon completion of some initial designs, piloting, and testing, all systems were migrated to the new environment over a 3 day time period. The migrations were transparent to the users, and included all original file and print services, updating the GroupWise environment, the ZENworks management, and incorporating updated services like DNS, DHCP, SLP and other related services.

 

Ross Berndt, MnSCU Director of Production Services said, “Today production services provide more services with better performance. The impact of the service enhancements implemented has been significant. Services are now provided in a high availability environment by utilizing virtualized servers. End users have been able to realize productivity improvements with features from Novell GroupWise and ZENworks.”

 

Ross went on to say, “The Solbrekk professional services team was able to provide these services on time and under budget.”