Keeping the data center running is one thing, but our goal is to optimize your data center. It should work harder for you, automate tasks, be more flexible, and fit the ever-changing needs of your university.
We achieve this using a variety of technologies to create an infrastructure that’s more responsive which accelerates application deployment, allowing you to scale infrastructure on demand, and automates the entire data center lifecycle.
Moving Towards IT-as-a-Service
Most university data centers aren’t there yet, due to siloed legacy systems, disparate management tools, and manual processes.
PIER Group develops customized ITaaS solutions to act as an internal service broker to the diverse community of university consumers. ITaaS allows universities to quickly provision IT resources, while maintaining management and control across the entire infrastructure and delivering a great user experience.
HPE Solutions
At PIER Group, we are vendor agnostic – we choose the best vendors and products that provide the optimal performance for each individual client. However, we recommend a number of HPE Data Center solutions for our clients because we understand the unique value they offer to an enterprise data center, and we understand how they can transform the data center’s role in campus IT infrastructure. These solutions include:
A hyperconverged platform that speeds application performance, improves efficiency and resiliency, and backs up/restores VMs in seconds
All-flash and hybrid HPE storage solutions like 3PAR, Nimble and Qumulo
Software-defined data centers based on HPE Synergy, which easily propagate services from a single management screen in a hybrid cloud environment
A proactive problem-solving solution that uses machine learning to optimize performance as well as detect and remedy small issues before they become major problems
Challenges of Campus Data Systems
We help universities discover creative solutions to carry out long-term plans when they’re deciding issues such as:
What and how much should be on the cloud vs. on-prem?
What’s the best way to tier storage? What will work best for us, all-flash storage or a hybrid solution?
What’s the best way to run analytics against this data we gather every day? What’s the best way to capture and access the data we might need?
What will our storage needs be in 5, 10, 100 years? How can we build something now that will work for future needs?
Although the vast majority of universities work within a hybrid cloud environment, many are reversing the trend of moving to all-cloud storage and bringing more storage back on campus. Their reasons vary, but it comes down to what works best in each individual case.