VMware goes to university, 40 of them

Stuart Corner
Friday, 25 July 2008 13:37

Business IT - Technology

Through the Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) more than 40 universities in Australia and New Zealand have implemented VMware's virtualisation technology.

CAUDIT members include nearly every university in Australia and New Zealand and according to VMware, more than 75 percent of eligible universities, with a combined enrolment of more than one million students, have begun deploying VMware products. "The universities will be running a broad range of applications in their virtualised environments, including data warehouses, email, ERP systems (eg PeopleSoft), and guest operating systems," VMware says.

CAUDIT negotiates collective procurement agreements, provides professional development, undertakes projects and fosters collaboration through the sharing of ideas, experiences and best practice amongst its members. VMware says its agreement with CAUDIT enable member institutions to deploy VMware and "deliver virtualisation solutions at standard and low costs, regardless of a school's size."

VMware claims that, for many institutions, the most compelling benefit of virtualisation is the time savings for delivering new applications for courses. "New application instances can be delivered in hours rather than weeks...Virtual machines can be created quickly and cheaply for development, testing or production work. This is particularly valuable in cases where the machines are required for short periods."

Virtualisation also enable data centres to cut energy consumption: Griffith University in Queensland, is reported to have cut power usage in its data centres by approximately 50 percent.