The College of New Jersey Uses VMware Cloud on AWS to Save $200,000 Yearly and Ensure Reliable Access for Students

VMware an AWS Partner, is helping The College of New Jersey ensure reliable access for more than 7,000 students, reduce annual costs by almost $200,000, and begin to recover data in 5 minutes in the event of a disaster. VMware helped the college migrate critical workloads, including finance and human resources applications, to VMware Cloud on AWS.

The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), located in Ewing Township, is one of the leading comprehensive colleges in the US, with 7,340 students across seven schools. The school’s 55-member IT department manages a range of mission-critical applications, including student information systems, media and technology support services, and finance and human resources applications.

 

For more than 10 years, TCNJ used an on-premises IT infrastructure to host and manage its application environment. However, the school’s leadership mandated that TCNJ pursue a cloud-first approach to new technologies and become more nimble and scalable. “As part of the mandate, we had to help better access for remote and virtual students so they could access learning applications and lab environments from any device at any time,” says Leonard Niebo, associate vice president and chief information officer at The College of New Jersey.

 

In addition, TCNJ wanted to improve the resilience of its application environment. “Our IT environment wasn’t always stable and we had frequent technology disruptions, which wasn’t acceptable because students and instructors need access to applications at all times,” Niebo says. “We needed to implement a cost-effective cloud solution that would help us address all our requirements.”

Initially, TCNJ staff considered several cloud technology providers, but they realized Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be the best fit for the school’s needs. “AWS offered the flexibility and agility we required,” says Niebo. TCNJ also knew AWS would integrate with the school’s existing VMware virtualization environment, which features two VMware clusters supporting more than 300 servers. “Our VMware environment just works, and we wanted to take advantage of our VMware existing investments and already developed internal skill set,” Niebo says.

TCNJ began its cloud migration by setting up VMware Horizon, which provides virtual desktop applications to students and staff. “Once we had that up and running and saw how scalable and easy to manage it was, we gained a lot of confidence in the cloud,” says Niebo. The college moved its on-premises workloads—including desktops, print servers, file servers, domain controllers, and app directory federation servers—to VMware Cloud on AWS. This service brings VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) solutions to AWS and helps customers run applications in hybrid cloud environments with optimized access to AWS services.

The college worked closely with AWS and VMware to deploy VMware Cloud on AWS and use AWS Direct Connect to help high-speed dedicated bandwidth. TCNJ now runs its media and technology support services and its finance and human resources applications on VMware Cloud on AWS.

Running its application environment on VMware Cloud on AWS, TCNJ ensures that students and faculty can access the systems they need when they need to, from home or from the classroom. “Our IT team can sleep better at night knowing that our systems won’t go down and that students can still access their classes and assignments at all times. We no longer have classroom disruptions caused by our legacy environment,” says Niebo. “Using VMware Cloud on AWS, we have a level of resilience and high availability we lacked with our previous on-premises solution.”

The school can also rapidly scale the application environment to meet fluctuations in user demand. “This was especially important when we had to go all-virtual last year,” says Niebo. “Overnight, we easily added more than 1,000 concurrent users, instead of the usual several hundred.”

In the event of a disaster, TCNJ can recover data faster by using VMware Cloud on AWS. Specifically, using VMware Site Recovery, the college can spin up a VMware environment on AWS and replicate data with a 5-minute recovery time objective. Niebo explains, “If a disaster did take place, we are confident we could restore systems and get up and running quickly on AWS.”

 

As TCNJ builds out its environment to support additional applications, the college plans to continue its close relationship with both AWS and VMware. “We know we can’t do this on our own. Our team needs the vendors we work with every day like VMware and AWS,” concludes Niebo. “This gives us the flexibility to put things on premises or in the cloud, depending on our needs. Ultimately, it helps us do what’s best for our institution, and that’s what we’re trying to focus on.”