Postsecondary Provider Achieves a Top-Grade Scalable ...



Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Education

Customer Profile

Career Education Corporation (CEC) has more than 83,000 students, 10,000 employees, and 80 campuses around the world. CEC is the world’s largest provider of postsecondary for-profit education.

Business Situation

With an expected growth rate of 35 percent annually, CEC wanted to establish a single, scalable application and database infrastructure capable of centralizing mission-critical applications for more than 40 campuses.

Solution

CEC deployed a 32-processor Unisys ES7000 server employing Intel Xeon 1.4 GHz processors and running Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Datacenter Server and SQL Server™ 2000.

Benefits

■ Scalability to support 40 new campuses

■ Increased employee productivity

■ An 80 to 1 reduction in database updates

■ Triple the number of concurrent users

| | |“Since we’ve implemented the Unisys and Microsoft platform, people have taken notice of how big we are and the kind of applications that we’re running—on higher education."

Mark Griesbaum, Chief Information Officer, Career Education Corporation

| |

| | | |With over 83,000 students and 10,000 employees on campuses around the world, Career Education |

| | | |Corporation (CEC) is the largest non-profit provider of postsecondary education. With all its |

| | | |campuses owning and operating their own systems and technology, CEC had no common infrastructure. |

| | | |Needing to centralize its mission-critical applications on a scalable, reliable infrastructure, CEC |

| | | |deployed a 32-processor Unisys ES7000 and Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Datacenter Server–based platform. |

| | | |CEC has seen an increase in employee productivity since implementation, despite doubling the number |

| | | |of campuses in its network through acquisition and increasing its concurrent users from 1,000 to |

| | | |3,000, By forming strategic partnerships, CEC is more confident of its position as a strong |

| | | |competitor in its market and feels assured it has the IT capabilities to deal with expected growth. |

| | | | |

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Situation

Career Education Corporation (CEC) is the world’s largest provider of postsecondary for-profit education in the world. With more than 83,000 students, 10,000 employees, and 80 campuses in North America, Europe, France, and the United Arab Emirates, CEC schools concentrate on IT, business, culinary arts, visual communications, graphical arts, and health education.

A few years ago, CEC was faced with a major IT challenge. All its campuses owned and operated their own systems and technology, with no common infrastructure in place, CEC knew it could only achieve greater manageability and performance by centralizing all these Microsoft® Windows® operating system–based systems, which all ran mission-critical applications, such as student information and financial systems.

At the same time, CEC had a total of 40 schools in its network with an expected annual growth rate of more than 35 percent. Running out of “horsepower” in its database environment, CEC needed a scalable solution to not only support its rapid growth, but also to help CEC establish a single, interconnected infrastructure for all its campuses. What’s more, with a top-notch IT environment in place, CEC would be able to continue attracting new campuses to its education network.

With help from Unisys technical consulting experts, CEC was able to execute its strategy within 15 months. CEC moved all its schools onto a single infrastructure and consolidated onto a 32-processor Unisys ES7000 server running on the Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server operating system and a SQL Server™ 2000 database environment. “In order for CEC to be a worldwide, first-class organization, we had to have a first-class infrastructure. That’s why we chose the Unisys ES7000 server,” says Mark Griesbaum, Chief Information Officer for CEC.

Proof of Concept

A proof-of-concept service delivered by Unisys, and Microsoft was key to the decision-making process and clearly demonstrated to CEC how well the ES7000 server would perform. Unisys took CEC’s mission-critical “Campus 2000” application, database, and all the transactions that occurred from its schools through a day-long period, and ran them on a 32-way ES7000 server running Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter and SQL Server 2000 at the Unisys Executive Briefing and Solution Center in Redmond, Washington.

“Once the benchmark was complete, the Unisys staff came back to us with the results and consulted with us on how to best configure the ES7000 and all of its components so that CEC would get the best processing power and performance from our applications,” says Griesbaum. “The proof of concept sold us on how well the ES7000 would handle our database. And it was obvious that this machine would support our continual growth.”

Solution

Since implementing the ES7000 server, CEC has been able to support rapid growth and has doubled the number of campuses in its network, which now totals 80. The ES7000 server is being used to run CEC’s most mission-critical application, Campus 2000. Used by every campus in the network, Campus 2000 tracks a student’s history—from recruitment to graduation and beyond, to postgraduate employment. Campus 2000 also holds basic information pertaining to a student’s financial aid, transcripts, and attendance.

“It doesn’t get more critical than not having enough scalability,” says Dave Czeszewski, Vice President, IT Strategic Development at CEC. “Implementing the ES7000 server has enabled CEC to operate in a scale-up environment and consolidate all of our schools into a single database. Now when we make an update to Campus 2000, we can update one database instead of 80.”

Before implementing the ES7000 server, Campus 2000 was experiencing performance problems. Response times were slow and users were receiving error messages. Now, Campus 2000 produces 8,000 transactions per minute (tpm). “I wanted people calling me up and saying, ‘Wow, what happened? What did you do?’ And that is exactly what happened,” says Griesbaum.

CEC currently runs a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database on the ES7000 server, which produces about 16 million transactions a day. “Prior to deploying the ES7000 server we had approximately 1,000 users per day who would access our system,” says Czeszewski. “Today, we have 3,000 concurrent users and expect to have a 30- to 35-percent growth rate on top of that on an annual basis. We are confident that with the scalable ES7000 server, we’ll easily be able to handle that growth.”

Additionally, CEC implemented Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server to run its Student Portal, which allows students a self-service view of their own individual information. Students can make tuition payments, register for classes, and view grades on the Student Portal. On a daily basis, 20,000 to 25,000 students use the student e-mail system provided by Student Portal.

The solution is also providing CEC with greater manageability and availability through Unisys Server Sentinel systems management software. “The Unisys platform provides a proactive approach to server availability with Server Sentinel and its call-home features,” says William Nissen, IT Infrastructure Manager at CEC. “If there’s a problem, we get a call from Unisys who lets us know what the problem is before we even realize it ourselves. It’s a nice feature in that it drives someone to care about whether your system’s operating.”

As part of its continuing growth, CEC was looking not only at computing power, but also throughput and application software. Knowing that it had the processing power of the ES7000 server to support continued growth CEC wanted to ensure it would have the throughput with its data storage and disks. As a result, CEC has implemented, through the partnership of Unisys and EMC, a new EMC DMX 3000 disk and Storage Area Network (SAN) solution. In its previous storage environment, CEC supported 5 terabytes of both EMC Clarion and Xiotech disk storage. Now CEC can support 30 terabytes in its new storage environment.

Benefits

CEC has experienced noticeable differences in operational efficiencies since implementing its solution. Not only has CEC seen an 80 to 1 reduction in database updates, but it’s been able to triple the number of concurrent users.

Increased Employee Productivity

Deploying the ES7000 server changed the way things at CEC were done. Previously, every school would send in financials and grade-reporting numbers, and CEC employees would have to manually put them together in spreadsheets—a very labor-intensive process. Now, by pushing only a few buttons, school administrators—right away—get information on how their schools are performing.

Scalability to Support 40 New Campuses

“The Unisys team understands our business, our future goals, and that, ultimately, is helping us better support our schools and our customers,” says Griesbaum. “They are always in touch with us and thinking about how they can help us get to the next level technology-wise and how they can bring different partners in to help get us there.”

In keeping up with the company’s rapid growth, CEC has purchased two 32-way Unisys ES7000 servers employing Intel Itanium 2 processors, a configuration which will enable the company to support a 64-bit architecture.

Through the strategic partnerships of Unisys, Microsoft, and EMC, CEC is positioned as a strong competitor in its market. “Since we’ve implemented the Unisys and Microsoft [solution], people have taken notice of how big we are and the kind of applications that we’re running—on higher education,” says Griesbaum. “We are confident that the reliable ES7000 platform will support CEC’s expected annual growth rate of more than 35 percent.”

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on the Microsoft Windows Server™ operating system. Windows Server System creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft's holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This helps you reduce the costs of ongoing operations, deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.

For more information about Windows Server System, go to:

windowsserversystem

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| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server

− Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000

■ |Unisys Products

− Unisys ES7000 Enterprise Server

− Unisys Server Sentinel systems management software

| |

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published June 2005 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about Unisys products and services, visit the Web site at: es7000

For more information about Career Education Corporation products and services, visit the Web site at:

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Dave Czeszewski, Vice President, IT Strategic Development, Career Education Corporation

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“It doesn’t get more critical than not having enough scalability."

Dave Czeszewski, Vice President, IT Strategic Development, Career Education Corporation

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