Schools, colleges, and universities serve as society's information powerhouses, providing the knowledge and skills students need to become future leaders, experts and innovators. Students have become more technology savvy. Parents and students are demanding more services from education institutions. At the same time, educators struggle to overcome budget shortfalls and rising tuition costs. They are looking to cut costs and reduce paper trails by allowing students access to their own data over the Internet - everything from basic biographic information, to financial aid to grade point averages. Affected by budget shifts and cuts, educators are looking for solutions and technology that improve the efficiency of administrative processes and the delivery of learning programs.
The growing popularity of online education is expected to result in a move from some of the traditional classrooms to real time education. As schools increasingly "open" their systems with more real-time network operations, increased attention is being placed on cyber security and the protection of identities and sensitive records. Application availability and disaster recovery have grown in importance as education institutions have become more dependent on technology.
System z is designed to minimize downtime, enabling schools, colleges and universities to provide their students and administrators with access to information anytime, anywhere. By directing processing capacity to a specific application when and where it is needed, server technology helps provide educational institutions with an efficient platform that can support their peak utilization requirements. The new System z10 Enterprise Class (z10 EC) delivers availability enhancements to help keep critical applications up and running.
The mainframe provides an integrated encryption infrastructure to protect sensitive and highly confidential data over the internet, in data bases and on tape to help schools, colleges and universities meet privacy goals and protect sensitive information. The z10 EC provides superior performance for encryption with an integrated cryptographic accelerator built into the hardware.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which is the basis of the IBM Open Education Roadmap offers the promise of improved agility and enhanced flexibility, enabling schools, colleges and universities to more rapidly introduce new services in response to student and faculty requirements or compliance with educational mandates. System z provides a secure, resilient and flexible platform to serve as the hub for an SOA infrastructure to increase efficiency, avoid duplication and share resources among departments.
System z virtualization can help educational institutions reduce total cost of ownership by enabling the consolidation of smaller distributed servers onto one platform. Savings in infrastructure costs can then be allocated to the development and delivery of enhanced academic programs. The z10 EC delivers significantly lower cost of ownership and new levels of energy efficiency. Schools, colleges and universities can then allocate the savings in infrastructure costs to develop and deliver new academic programs. With increased capacity, the z10 EC virtualization capabilities can help to support hundreds or thousands of virtual Linux servers running open source software in a single footprint.
The ability to rapidly deploy new virtual servers and host multiple Linux images on a single System z server can enable schools, colleges and universities to provide students with individual hands-on learning experience. Advanced virtualization and dynamic resource sharing allow multiple applications to run on the same server at high operational efficiency, enabling educators to more cost effectively introduce new programs, such as distance learning, while minimizing the need for additional hardware purchases.
Below you will find white papers, analyst studies, success stories and more to help you understand how System z enables educational institutions to control costs, increase efficiency, provide security and resilience and deliver what's demanded by their constituents.
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The resources described here can help you understand how to address education industry IT issues with IBM System z solutions.
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Read these success stories to see how IBM has helped customers in the education industry benefit from System z solutions.
Ball State University bridges disparate systems and solves key administrative issues with IBM SOA solution
The IBM SOA solution, which runs on the mainframe, enables Ball State University to resolve name and address discrepancies in 10 months as opposed to several years for hand-coding application connections, thereby streamlining administrative processes and ensuring information integrity for users.
From the case study: "SOA has been such a gift to us. It enables us to embrace a new technology that provides services at a level that we couldn't even imagine before."
Illinois State University works with IBM to equip students with 21st-century computing skills on the mainframe
From the case study: "In meetings with companies, they described how the market for programmers with System z skills was tightening as baby-boomer generation professionals retired. Working with these companies, we created the plan for new courses in Enterprise Computing Systems which would solve the skills bottleneck and ensure that graduates had valuable expertise that would help them secure employment in this field…..The immense total computing capacity of the z890 also means we will be able to introduce distance learning programs, where students outside Illinois State can register and participate in the course."
Initially virtual mainframes systems were provided for students to access remotely via the Internet, enabling them to gain hands-on experience on the mainframe platform. As the program grew, the IBM Academic Initiative determined that it was time to provide a mainframe server on campus to enable Illinois State University to further expand its program and meet the growing expectations of the professors and students.
University of Florida teaches value of CICS Transaction Server on the mainframe
New and transferring students are required to take one of five health education programs before registering for academic courses. The university needed to develop an administrative framework for the packaged education program. With CICS Transaction Server on the mainframe, the project was completed in less than six weeks with low total cost of ownership.
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