New IT capabilities prepare CNA for worst case scenarios
8/27/2009 9:50:54 AM
College of the North Atlantic and Dell Canada recently completed a partnership that will ensure the college’s information technology capabilities remain in place in the event of a natural or man-made disaster.
The partnership, featured on the Dell Canada Case Study website, was developed to meet an existing challenge at the college. The Dell ProConsult Services team worked with the college in developing a solution to protecting data and keeping the organization running in the event of a disaster, while also accommodating the expansion of IT services by designing and deploying a flexible and scalable in-house disaster recovery solution.
The project was successful on a number of fronts, including coming in more than $25,000 under budget and forecasting a savings to the college of more than $300,000 over the next four years. These savings will be in the form of reduced costs for hardware, maintenance, support, power and cooling of IT infrastructure.
“Our provincial analyst’s technical skills and abilities to think outside of the box in integrating multiple cutting edge technologies were crucial in the success of the project,” said Gary Comeau, manager of IT infrastructure. “Whether it was in the concept war rooming exercise; the wide area network redesign and configuration; the virtualization of the network operations center, or the design, mapping and documentation of the required data structures, these individuals worked shoulder to shoulder with industry leading consultants.”
On multiple occasions the CNA team provided technical design solutions for issues that the varying consultants viewed as ‘show stoppers’. By the time the project was complete Dell Canada requested a debriefing of the college team to assist in the formulation of a technical play book for a new Dell business unit planned to supply similar solutions to their clients.
“The relationship between Dell and College of the North Atlantic is mutually beneficial and covers all areas with Information Technology,” said Kyle Schilke, Service Solutions Executive at Dell. “Dell aims to provide customers with pillars of efficiency in procurement, services and standardization. “
“The college was engaged with Dell in all areas and our recent success in the virtualization project clearly demonstrates a solution involving software, hardware and services procured under a single provider (Dell) with single point of accountability.”
The case study can be viewed at Dell_CNA
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For more information contact:
Roger Hulan
Communications Specialist
College of the North Atlantic
(709) 643-7938
roger.hulan@cna.nl.ca