Voted “Best for the World Overall” Honoree for overall social and environment impact in 2014, VIF provides professional development and curriculum programs to its educator network. In the Learning Center, teachers collaborate in an online community, earn and collect achievement badges in living portfolios, and work toward becoming a global-ready teacher. As educators progress through the company’s professional development modules, they transform their teaching practices and learning environments.
VIF knew they had a great product, but when they experienced a 500% surge in user growth in their first year, they knew they had to act fast to scale their IT infrastructure. Their business systems and Learning Center platform ran on VMware vSphere® clusters hosted on an IBM blade infrastructure located in their main office. This rapid growth strained their physical capacity, wreaking havoc on the platform’s reliability as they began experiencing bandwidth issues. Senior Systems Engineer Mark Haney was on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week and was constantly worried about power outages, "It became important to us to find a solution that allowed us to grow at a faster rate than our internal infrastructure was capable of doing."
VIF looked to the cloud to extend their platform and enable continued growth. Since they were already familiar with VMware tools and processes, VMware vCloud® Air™ offered the greatest interoptibility and made the most sense. Haney elaborates on their decision, stating, “The fact that vCloud Air allows me to use the same vSphere interface to manage both our internal servers and our systems in the cloud just makes life a whole lot easier. I don’t have to learn a new system and a new interface. Even better, I don’t have to teach it to anyone else.”
By extending their Learning Center platform to vCloud Air, VIF was able to achieve:
- 99.99 percent platform availability – With nearly 100 percent platform availability, VIF can provide a stable, consistent UX to its community of international teachers and students.
- 33 percent reduction in compute resources – The Monday prior to going live in the cloud, VIF had 180 teachers on the local server and showed a CPU load of over 40 percent. A week later, they had more than 200 teachers on the platform and a CPU load that hovered at just 10 percent. “The site is just phenomenally faster. That not only makes life easier for us, it makes the user experience better for our teachers.”
- Scalability – Increased platform reliability and stability allows VIF to grow without worrying about bandwidth limitations. By extending customer data centers to the cloud, VIF has been able to grow from 8,000 users to 11,800 users. “What we’re trying to do now is get ahead of the curve from a scalability standpoint. Moving to vCloud Air positions us to deliver whatever resources are needed to grow the business.”
Director of Curriculum and Instructional Design Anamaria Knight summarizes the true value of the cloud, “A cloud platform is essential because we are not only talking to the people in this office; we are talking to the entire country, and we’re talking to the entire world, so we need to create something and rely on the cloud to communicate what we’ve created to the world. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without the cloud service.
VIF is now looking for additional ways to leverage vCloud Air for future growth. They’re considering using the cloud to build test and development environments and implement a comprehensive cloud-based disaster recovery strategy to protect their data. “Running on vCloud Air gives us the flexibility to think about ways that can continually grow and improve performance and protect our system.”
With a stable infrastructure and room to scale, VIF can focus on building new services to support their mission of delivering global education for all.
To learn more about how VIF uses vCloud Air to create an interconnected learning environment for students and teachers, watch the video or read the case study.
For more information about VMware vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand visitvcloud.vmware.com,and keep an eye on the blogfor upcoming tips and best practices for using vCloud Air.
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from vmwarenews.de , Original Post Here
