Florida College Taps IBM Virtualization Innovative Technology

HostReview.com
Friday, January 13, 2006; 08:55 AM

IBM today announced that Palm Beach Community College in Florida has selected IBM systems and Linux to simplify its IT infrastructure.

"We were looking to secure and automate as many of our critical workloads on the mainframe and get greater economy of scale by moving to Linux for a low-cost, high-performance solution," said Tony Parziale, CIO, Palm Beach Community College.

The zSeries system runs the College's custom Enterprise Resource Planning system based on Software AG Adabase software running on the SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server V9 operating system. Prior to using the z890, the College depended on an older IBM mainframe for its ERP support. IBM Premier Business Partner Cornerstone Systems installed the new mainframe.

Palm Beach Community College is a top producer of associate degrees in the U.S., with more than 49,000 students enrolled across 90 study areas. The college operates five campuses and centers throughout Palm Beach County Florida and also offers online classes throughout the country.

The College is working with IBM as a strategic partner to consolidate multiple tiers of its computing operations into a more efficient, open infrastructure: With this new solution in place, the College plans to have significant paper documents imaged and digitally saved to the virtualized storage network. The move to paperless is intended to help safeguard important information in the event of severe hurricane conditions in southern Florida.

"Taking advantage of innovative IBM virtualization technologies, Palm Beach Community College is making it simpler and less expensive to manage workloads and computer systems while also increasing resiliency and improving access to information," said Rich Lechner, vice president of Virtualization, IBM.