University Virtualises Applications with Cisco

January 24, 2008: Avans University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands has announced that using Cisco Application Networking it has virtualised many of its applications, reducing costs and improving provisioning speeds of e-learning systems and applications.

The university used Cisco’s Application Control Engine (ACE) to make better use of existing server hardware, centralise management of 230 servers and streamline application maintenance.

Virtualisation is really taking off, with many organisations and institutions using it, like Avans, to spread the load from applications, such as email and e-learning specific to various departments, across servers for easier control, simplified management and reduced costs.

Avans claims that the Cisco ACE will help it save it EUR 1000 per server by removing the need to buy extra hardware and enabling applications to share resources from multiple servers.

The technology will also enable the University to carry out application maintenance during the day without interrupting services to students and staff, and it expects the Cisco ACE to help it reduce the number of servers it needs over the next few years by 30 percent.

"The Cisco ACE will make the whole process of developing and managing learning and administration services at Avans much easier,” said Hans Marcus, network engineer at Avans. “Using the server and application virtualization capabilities in Cisco ACE, we will also be able to scale services as demand increases without large increases in hardware investment.”

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